In the news

Billions in dollars in arms sales to the Saudi princelings. As famed fighters, at least on the slopes of Gstaad, the stuff’s unlikely to be used. Certainly it’ll never be deployed against the Great Satan Iran unless operated by mercenaries, US canon fodder, or whomever else they’ll buy before fleeing back to the slopes. I understand the goodies have to be stored far out in the desert so that the population won’t be able to get near it should they finally throw off the yoke of the “House of Saud.”
*
Does Roberts’ benign idiopathic seizure give us hope? In his early 50s, he otherwise promises decades of reactionary activism on the Court, breaking the back of civil rights, returning women to their place, making the rich richer, and completing the turn-over of American democracy to the CEOs. Fall some more, Johnny-boy. More likely, they’ll just dope him up and have his little Federalist Society clerk/assassins write his hateful opinions.
*
Speaking of Frankenstein monsters, I missed the results of the search for Cheney's heart. The President for tax cuts, torture, and pollution needed a new battery evidently. His last words before they put him under: "Must destroy democracy! Must destroy democracy!"
*
They're going to bust down a retired general for the Pat Tillman Show?? Oooooo!

Falco peregrinus

Reading about peregrine falcons. The name comes from the Latin for wanderer; the same root is in our “peripatetic.” In the western hemisphere, peregrines can migrate across the breadth of both North and South America. Imagine that for a moment. A pound or so of bird making a trip of that distance, sometimes flying a couple of hundred miles a day. Born near the Arctic circle, then flying south along a route not known to it, unless the route is imprinted genetically. And then, the following spring, returning to the place it was born to reproduce. Not all go as far. Some of the Eastern subspecies, reintroduced after DDT extirpated the locals, tend to enjoy the rich supply of pigeons found in cities. They return from the south to aeries in the buildings and bridges of NYC, among other places. Niches in the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge are popular (you can see the whitewash of old mutes, or droppings, if you look carefully). For several years a pair have raised young in a scrape at 55 Water St., under the eye of a webcam. Not this year, though.

We nearly exterminated them, and the other raptors, through the use of persistent deadly chemicals, still present in the environment even though banned, and still concentrating up the foodchain. At the top of that chain stands the giant killer ape H. sapiens sapiens: the poisons in us are our own doing. We’re all steadily accumulating PCBs, DDT, dioxin, other organochlorines, flame retardants, uranium, mercury… the list goes on. The Arctic is being devoured by the need for gas and oil, while the permafrost melts due to the burning of all those hydrocarbons. In the south, the pampas have been converted to cash crops and cattle, the same things that vanquished our great prairies; the jungle between is being burned down; herbicides are sprayed wantonly in the “drug war.” These are crimes against ourselves, of course, but they are also a betrayal of the planet. We, because we have the ability, should be stewards the planet, but we’re the destroyers instead.

Aqua Bull

Pepsico’s Aqua Fina will now have to be labeled as what it is: publicly sourced tap water. One of the most destructive tentacles of world capital has been the privatization of water. You can read about that here and here. The bottled water “sector” in the advanced capitalist states is only one component of this privatization. But let’s say you don’t mind that something so utterly necessary for life can be controlled by profiteers. Consider the huge amounts of water wasted in the production of the plastic bottles that tap water goes into. You might recycle your plastic bottles, but most of the rest of the world doesn’t. That shit is choking our world. The industry is unsustainable.

On the subway the other day, a couple of preteen boys were drinking Red Bull. How happy the marketers must be: get them hooked early and own ’em for life. The boys’ dad was there, displaying some terrible parenting. Yet blaming him without the context of the ideological indoctrination he swims in makes no sense.

The defenders of the faith insist that they give the people what they want. That the shit they produce tastes good and makes consumers happy. But then why can't we have opium and heroin?

Q. And children?

A: And children.

Couldn’t see this coming… right. Stories of summary execution, imprisonment, and torture of Iraqi civilians who earn the wrath of the world’s greatest war machine, from soldiers disgusted at their own actions and the works of their “band of brothers.” Of course it was foreordained: clueless about the language, history, culture, religion, and politics of the people they are amidst, ignorant, callow, and purposely brutalized (to kill, their humanity has to be broken) soldiers lash out with a fury. Their racism (“sand nigger” and “haji,” [a term of respect in Moslem societies, here bastardized] are the “gook” of the day) and arrogance play superbly into the hands of their enemies, alienating the locals, fostering anti-Americanism, stoking the fires of vengeance. An army of occupation is a sitting duck in the filthy politics of war; right out the Algeria playbook.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died as a result of George Bush’s war. Two million are exiles. How much longer are we going to put up with this?

It isn't pessimism that makes me say this, merely history: even if the war ended tomorrow, there will still be years of revelations about war crimes committed in our name. And the soldiers themselves, traumatized by all the brutality, what’s to become of them?

A Fool's Errand

Tony Blair’s off to the Middle East as a semi-plenipotentiary of sorts, but he looks to me to be plenty impotent. With the U.S. firmly on the side of the long Israeli project to eradicate Palestinian self-determination, no real peace will come of continued oppression and occupation and apartheid. The Western plan to prop up Fatah as a client regime won’t last. Puppets never do. The human dignity of a people can’t be suppressed forever. Unfortunately, we’ve now taught the Palestinians that all our talk about democracy means nothing, since we promptly strangled the legitimate voice of the Palestinians who voted for Hamas. Hamas -- which was once fostered as a bulwark against the secular, socialist Fatah, ah the bitter ironies of the past -- is going to end up looking like a moderate force in comparison to the nihilists who emerge with all hopes smashed.

Meanwhile, the realities on the ground are what count: Israel controls the air and the water and all the good land in-between, penning Palestinians into Bantustans. The settlers on the hills, in their fortress towns connected by their own highways, are like the pieds noir in Algeria, fanatical, vigilante colonialists who have stolen the best land, in yet another spasm of European colonialism. Of course, the other fact on the ground is demographic, which means that all the walls in the world can’t keep the peace.

Throughput

That’s all you are as a patient, you know. "Throughput." You have, on average, 8 minutes of face time with the MD. Meanwhile, they've got from 25 to 70 more patients to see today; I'm sorry what was your problem again? Ironic, isn’t it, that doctors, who did so much to kill the devil of “socialized medicine” after the Second World War have now become highly-trained assembly line workers themselves.

Elsewhere, of course, productivity has skyrocketed, but wages are retrograde if not stagnant. What else? Your masters are making tens of millions off of you (while "income tax" cuts put the burden on those, the great majority of us, whose wages are taxed). The hedge funds, unregulated as pirates until they crash and burn and come begging to be rescued by the rest of us because “they are too big to fail,” are creating an unprecedented ruling class. The politicos of both parties are snugly in their pockets. Garbage made of cheap corn is subsidized to fatten and stupefy you. They want you to be "team players": passive and orderly and powerless. Unthinking. You are being creamed, skimmed, even proletarianized in your white collars. Harry Potter, Inc. and the other technologies to prevent you from reaching (conscious, critical) adulthood are here to pretend to massage your soul, sooth the ache of anomy, alienation, the hollowness, but only to leave you wanting more. They want you to think you have to buy your way to happiness, again and again and again, instead of fighting for it.

The solution remains an old one: Unite and take it back.

Misinformation

Passing three women yesterday. One said, Turkey is having an election today. Another said, yes, isn't it exciting; they'll get rid of those burkhas. Actually, the moderate Islamic party won convincingly, and they seem to be the equivalent of Christian Democrats in Europe. Also, they don’t do burkhas in Turkey. There are headscarves, but under secular law such things are illegal in schools, jobs, etc. It is a complicated situation, but I fear the misinformation, half-truths, and stereotypes of even educated folks here don’t do anything to further the understanding of what’s going on.

Iraq

Waiting for September... or is it now November? Whatever the date is, it's another bullshit deadline desined for the US domestic market, not any realistic response to facts on the ground in Iraq. The war’s already lost. Peter Galbraith has it succinctly: “The Shiites voted twice in 2005 for parties that seek to define Iraq as a Shiite state. By their boycotts and votes the Sunni Arabs have almost unanimously rejected the Shiite vision of Iraq’s future, including the new constitution. The Kurds’ envisage an Iraq that does not include them.” He doesn't call it this, but there's talk of "soft partition" cycling among the so-called governing class of America.

So many parallels

The French army wanted to believe they were drawing the line against international communism. Paris thought all the weapons and money was coming from Cairo. In fact, the Algerians were nationalists first. They had little but rhetorical support from the blowhard Nasser until after Suez and Third World anti-imperialism forced his hand. Meanwhile, Moscow and Beijing were Johnny-come-lately as well, but I suppose you get what you wish for.

Bush needs to claim that “al-Qaida in Iraq” is the main enemy in Iraq, and that it’s the same as the al-Qaida who attacked the U.S. He’s wrong on both accounts, but I assume he thinks we’ll fall for if he keeps repeating it enough.

Our own CIA, our own FBI!

The "little lady who started the war," Judith Miller, was gushing about the NYPD’s counterterror and intelligence functions this morning on Brian Lehrer’s show this morning. Oh-oh. Be afraid, be very afraid. Love the way she’s moved over to Manhattan Institute, though.

Against The Beast

When asked what he thought should replace the Christianity he so unfailingly attacked, Voltaire replied that since the beast was sucking the blood of his family, he most surely did not want to replace it. This is quoted in Curtis White’s two-part article in Orion on the nature of our destruction of our own lives that is the continued assault on the environment. Food for thought:
Part One: Idols of Environmentalism
www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/233
Part Two: The Ecology of Work
www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/267/

White’s essay is excerpted in August’s Harper's, which also has a piece by Jonathan Kozol about the continuing effort to swap America’s public education system, a hallmark of democracy, for one based on profits. He introduces me to a term I hadn’t heard before, the EMOs, or “education management organizations” set on the thin edge of the pro-voucher wedge to become the HMOs of one of the last frontier of the public sphere, and hence our democracy. If nothing else, in the ruins of our antihealth care system, one can see the irony of the financiers deciding to use so similar a name for their attempted take-over.

Algeria

The stab-in-the-back theory of Vietnam still echoes: the media, the politicians, the hippies, et al. kept the grunts from “winning.” But that post-colonial war was not “winnable” by military force, even if every battle was won. There isn’t going to be a “victory” in Iraq, either. I worry about the effects of this loss on the military. Its so-called professionalization has in many ways cut it off from civil society. Ending the draft and tossing the notion of citizen-soldiers into the dustbin of history positioned the military outside the mainstream, while the self-styled romanticism of “warrior” culture threatens to imbue them with the sense that they’re better than that mainstream because they’re protecting it. A strong identification with the Right hardly helps. It’s not hard to imagine the circumstances that will make them feel like they have to step in. For you know the reasoning will be that they are saving democracy (from itself).

The reason I’m thinking such dark thoughts is that I’m reading Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962. I’ll be coming back to the many disturbingly relevant themes in this must-read, but for the moment I want to touch on the dangers of a defeated military to a democracy. The French Army, humiliated in 1940, rode back to glory in ’45, but only on the coattails of the Allies; then it had its ass kicked in Dien Bien Phu, after another decade of war; the colonels, who had by then spent their entire adult lives fighting, drew the line in Algeria. They damn sure wouldn’t let the politicians betray them again (as they saw it; this was before the “media” was such a whipping boy) and went so far as attempt a coup d’etat. Well before then, they had been deeply compromised by the use of torture.

Why?

Add the corporate media’s stenographic services, a cheap forgery about Niger yellowcake, and the fantasies of a crazy informant to the headlong determination of the neoconservatives to go to war in Iraq and you’ve pretty much got the “how.” Thomas Powers gives an amazingly good summary in the NYRB of the neocon drive to war as he takes apart Richard Tenet’s self-serving whitewash of a book. Tenet should have written his book in prison along with the others who have gotten away with mass murder: Cheney and his crew of neocon ghouls; Rumsfeld playing patty-cake at the war department; good soldier Colin Powell, who knows from Nuremburg that being a good soldier is not a legitimate excuse; that hack Rice and the rest of the President’s lapdogs; and of course, the Idiot Prince himself.

But the question still remains “why.” Politically, it seems clear that the War Party wanted both to show it had the right stuff to do something about 9/11 and to use that right stuff to consolidate its power domestically. I mean much more than paint the Democrats as treasonous, of course, although that too was rather successful for a time.

For our history shows us time and again that overseas adventures are the perfect excuse to clamp down on threats to elite control, as shown by the dissolution of the populist movement during the Spanish- American War, the suppression of the progressive movement by the First World War, and the taming of radical elements in the labor movement during the Cold War. These threats to the powers-that-were were set nicely aside by the tides of conforming nationalism, xenophobia, jingoism, Red Scares, and the like. (An exception is the Civil Rights movement, which survived even as Vietnam bled and the original "neocons" of the Neoconfederacy used the Red Scare playbook in attempting to de-legitimize it.)

Of course, there was no reformist threat at the beginning of the 21st century. (The bond market’s bondsman Bill Clinton had seen to that quite nicely). But there was the long project of the neoconservatives to supplant what we have of democracy with their brand of authoritarianism, a combination of neoliberal market fundamentalism (excepting for unfettered government control in matters of police, incarceration, and wealth transfer), with its magnificent success in restoring class power to robber baron levels, and the supposed moral rigors of Christian theocracy (in practice, just another corrupt patronage mill). Cheney and Rumsfeld, for example, both made plain their burning desire to undo the mild constraints on Executive overreach following Watergate, where they both cut their very sharp teeth, and largely succeeded in the wake of the national emergency of 9/11. They got their Reichstag fire. Cheney, the Cardinal Richelieu behind the Son King’s empty throne, and the intellectual gurus of neoconservatism have made their contempt for democracy loud and clear from their offices, coin-operated think tanks, corporate sinecures, and media cat-bird seats. War is their dream come true: they need it to last forever, it’s what gives them meaning, and power.

They saw their chances and took ‘em. Politics 101. It’s an oft-brutal endeavor, especially when the stakes are hegemonic. When you add hegemonic domestic power to military control of Middle East oil (plus keeping China at bay), pouring billions into the war industries (and gutting social spending), it all adds up.

Representation

Due to our archaic Constitution, the Senate is controlled by Senators from 26 states, and should those states add up to only 20% of the population, too bad, they’re still calling the shots in that body. Of course, 20% isn’t the proper proportion, because a good percentage of people in those states, sometimes more than half, don’t vote at all. So roughly ten percent of the US population controls the Senate. It gets worse when you consider the narrow margins of victory in many elections: those who voted for the loser aren’t represented in a winner-take-all system.

The Senate, you will recall, was Founded by artisto-wannabes who made no bones of their fear of the unruly and unwashed mass (of white male property owners, the only people enfranchised), and wanted a House of gentleman (they were mostly appointed by governors to the office until the early 20th century) to keep the lid on any potential popular excesses. (In the so-called “People’s House” meanwhile, you may recall that the vaunted Gingrich “Revolution” came about even though 4/5ths of the American people did not vote for it.) It’s little wonder that most Senators are millionaire members of the economic elite, and that it now costs tens of millions to get a seat at that particular banquet.

Solutions (these are just off the top of my head, so I’m probably missing some good ideas):

Publicly funded campaigns. Of course power will out, and the money will flow, so strict disclosure, equitable air-time, and a vastly more investigative media are needed. (The Supreme Court’s decision in Buckley that money equaled speech was typical of that body’s adherence to elite class power.)

Electoral reform. There are ideas and local examples aplenty: proportional representation, instant run-off, cross-endorsement, non-partisan administration of registration & ballot access, an Election Day holiday.

Constitutional reform.

Citizenship. An informed, participating citizenry… imagine that.

Putinization

For now, the neocons can only dream of Putinization, but you know they wake with soiled jammies. In Russia, “managed democracy,” a Tsarist-like power structure, tightly controls dissent. Media, NGOs, and other aspects of civil society are highly constricted, and although the state itself may not have had thirteen journalists assassinated in recent years, it also hasn’t convicted anyone for these crimes and it has benefited from the cowed press. Admittedly, murder is rare; more usual is this "soft" repression story.

At least for the moment, the Russian people seem to agree with these methods. They were so traumatized by the post-Soviet shocks of western-enforced neoliberalism (the economy was looted by finance capital, new oligarchs emerged, thieving their way to billions, and average life span plummeted, a story little covered here), that they demand the stability, the ol’ law and order, that Tsar Vlad & Co. claim to deliver.

Ah, the bitter irony, that neoliberalism, long sold under the rubric of “freedom,” so inexorably leads to authoritarianism, either directly, as concentrated power and wealth maintains its grip, or indirectly, as when nationalists respond to its depredations in anti-democratic ways.

Thoughts for the day

Well, now we know how many dead and wounded it takes to break Senators Lugar, Voinovich, and Domenici’s slavish devotion to the Iraq Disaster. How many more for the next GOP defector from the holy cause of party-above-all?

Not, mind you, that we're seeing much dissent against military industrial keynesianism & (paradoxically, but one of many contradictions) neoliberalism that the Democrats are mostly signed up in a bloodpact with, too. Senator Clinton's quietly admitted that the megabases in Iraq will not go unmanned, and Obama the Hopeful One is only selling a notion (one bottle will cure what ails you, friends), so don't expect much from him. In fact, nothing should be expected from them; they need to be forced to represent us.

“Executive privilege” is the latest bullshit defense being put up the anti-democracy team bunkered in the White House. Unitary executive, fourth branch of government, monarchy, if the President does it isn’t illegal, Commander-in-Chief, yadda-yadda. A government of men -- or corrupt dwarves, as the case now is -- instead of laws is not a pretty thing.

Sicko

Saw Sicko tonight and liked it more than any of Moore’s other agitprop interventions. I can’t say I learned anything new, since I’ve long thought universal health care is a requisite human right. A profit-driven (un)health system is criminal and barbaric. That part’s a no brainer, but of course getting there is the heart of the matter. Tony Benn states it forthrightly: when the people demand it they get it. That’s democracy, not the charade we have now. Of course an anxiety-ridden, fearful, demoralized, unhealthy, debt-bondage populace trained to think as if they are the problem, that's most difficult to organize. The power against us, a system profiting off our very bodies and actual lives, is tremendous.

Moore’s point that it’s all about “we” instead of “me” is right on. We already know how shared social costs like fire and police protection work. Wellness and health should be no different. We know that public institutions like schools and libraries are key to democracy. So's health: it’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” after all. We know that some of us already have aspects of socialized -- i.e. costs borne across society -- medicine: look at Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and the great healthcare Congress gets.

Stand and demand it, people.

A gang of moderate conservatives

What are we going to do with the Democrats? Mike Davis has an interesting, if long-winded analysis
here. Sure, the party is liberal in cultural matters, but it is just as beholden to the corporate power structure of America (and the world). (Nader’s critique is still valid, even though he is persona non grata and a convenient scapegoat: after all, it was Gore who couldn't get those Nader votes, nor fight for his actual plurality.) It’s just as ensnared in the money power, which has developed a “bipartisan” system very much to its liking. Instead of the GOP’s oil, health profiteers, and mercenaries, the Dems have hitched their stars to high tech and high finance. Yes, they’re just plain nicer than the GOP, but they’re still in thrall to the bond market and the rest of the neoliberal project. As such, even if they win the Presidency and larger majorities in Congress, they will give us nothing but tepid measures. Unless, of course, we force them to change our nation for the better, towards a socal democracy that cares for its citizens, not the profits of a few, for us and not that tiny elite of owners whose boots they polish and hope to wear. And that force, of course, doesn’t come from the checkbook.

So while it’s sweet that lots of people are writing checks for Obama, I remained stupefied about the willingness of people to continue in their infantile course of hoping something will happen instead of making it happen. We already had the Man from Hope, an absolutely fucking disaster who paved the way for GOP control, so now it’s the man of hope? When are people going to realize that a symbolic politics keep leading to the same winners, and that’s not us.

This is a nation of taxi passengers. The driver breaks all the rules and the passengers just sit there hoping to get to their destination without saying anything, contributing to the lawlessness, recklessness, and obnoxiousness of the journey.

Happy Birthday

For a bunch of property owners, not a bad piece of work…the Declaration. Check out that bill of particulars about the crimes of the then George.

And here's to the continuing struggle to make it real. The reign of witches shall pass!

The Cat in the Machine

“The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction,” wrote Wm. Blake, no doubt thinking of those plodding old nags in the Royal Academy…

I love dogs! Case in point, the border collie: handsome, brilliant, and comes in cool colors (check out the merles). I love them perhaps a tad more than cats, but I’m not one of these either/or extremists; I believe there’s nothing wrong with dogs and cats living together, but I have to admit that dogs are usually to be found the wrong side, iconographically speaking. Think German shepherds, Birmingham’s dogs loosened on the crowd (“we feed our dogs on Civil Rights” sang Phil Ochs), and Abu Ghraib. Cats, it’s true, have witchcraft marked against them, but wasn’t witchcraft just a nasty old patriarchal purge of uppity rhymes-with-witches?

The cat, actually, is curiously and most often associated with the left (baring A. Spiegelman’s Nazis). Must be the nine lives: the glorious future of unfettered capital having resulted in ruin, anomie, and those glories of what the market will bear (porn/drugs/sex/violence), resistance emerges from the shadows, from under the couch to rub its back against your thigh. Le chat noir, le chat rouge: the old trickster. Chris Marker’s long meditation on what happened to the ‘68ers, Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de l'air est rouge, revised) and his shorter exploration of “M. Chat” in the Case of the Grinning Cat (Chats Perches) are cases in point. The sly, secretive, wily feline with the grin, against all the odds? Able to melt into the air like all that is solid? Think the Cheshire Cat, the Reverend Dodgson’s elusive kitty. On my side of Okeanos, the Wobblies had their black cat (a wild cat, of course, hence the strike), arched in hissing menace.

The Cat in the Hat, though not specifically radical (although under the Prussians, it must be said that elementary school was banned as subversive) is still an anarchic spin on things, and oh-so-elegantly dressed. And Krazy Kat, who was neither crazy nor a cat according to his hip cat inventor Geo. Herriman, may be the most radical of all in her/his optimism. (The man was playing with race, gender, & identity long before Weimar, much less the academy.) There is a heppy heppy land, my friends, and though it be far away, in monumental Coconino of the mind, the journey is worth taking. You can read C. Van Vechten’s Tiger in the House along the way, the book having been reissued by one of my favorite imprints, New York Review Books. Meanwhile, in the tiger’s stripes, Walt. Ford sees the ghosts of warriors past fighting colonial invasions. Meow, you motherfuckers.

Scootered

No, seriously, how do you deal with these motherfuckers? In my effectless rage, I sent this into the maw of the White House tonight... adolescent of me, I know, but...

Thank you for commuting I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's sentence. The thought he might have to serve time for subverting the fundamental basis of our judicial system was entirely too much for my old heart to take. Two counts of perjury, one of obstruction of justice, and one of making false statements to federal investigators, crimes which go to the very heart of the integrity of our judicial system, well pish! In your America, only the poor and stupid should suffer the full weight of the law. The rest of us have either good lawyers or Presidents who are above the law. Hooray! A government of laws is for losers, communists, terrorists, and other unamericans. Keep up the good work, Commander. Law and order, law and order, law and order forever!

PS: take notes from that Putin guy, since he knows how to run a country good.

The Activist Court

Bleating Leahy, who voted for Roberts, was complaining this weekend how disappointed he is with Roberts’ partisan leadership of the reactionary Supreme Court. WTF? How can someone this bright be so clueless? The GOP agenda to radically transform the Court into the pro-corporate anti-democractic entity it used to be has NEVER been secret. Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, and Kennedy: five conservative Catholic men are now the activist majority at the Court (talk about bad news for women!), and the Democrats did nothing to stop them from gaining that control. These guys stand for the power of the state (as a corporate tool), the corporation, and the church; they are the handmaidens of the elites. They are against desegregation, for control of the polity by wealth, for sectarian division, for controlling women’s bodies. Last week’s string of precedent-turning 5-4 decisions for “fee speech” (sic) for corporations and against free speech for high-school students; for the continuing re-segregation of education; and against antitrust were long ago foretold. Once again, thanks Democrats, for nothing.

Fantasy Islands

In the fantasy Gulf States, third world laborers build Xanadus for the world’s masters and their pet scribes (cf. flathead Thomas Friedman). Working as indentured servants, if not downright slaves, these East Asians are shipped in, have their passports confiscated, and housed in barracks away from the glitter, completely at the mercy of authoritarian states making their hellholes safe for finance capital. In the hotels, imported maids clean the excrement of highflying capital accumulators, consultant pols (Bill Clinton’s been pimping in the region), and other reps of the Global One Percent, from the rims of toilets. Meanwhile, prostitutes shipped in from the ruins of eastern Europe and Russia service other needs.

A long way from here? Not really. This model of the global service economy is alive and well on the resort island of Nantucket. Now thickly warted with what I call SUV-houses, grossly overscaled (and a real perversion of the island’s character), the place has become a case study of the workings of the global gastarbeiter system. A quarter century ago when I graduated from high school there, it was American college kids who used to do the lawn-mowing, bed-making, cleaning, and cooking; I washed dishes and cooked there myself there during college summers. More recently, there was a cohort of Irish kids; today, it’s workers from Brazil, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe. Last week, there was an article in the local weekly (which I also used to work for) about three young Bulgarians who were suckered into paying serious coin to come to work as maids on the island. Only, once they got there, there were no jobs. Nor any place to live, either.

Dorm-like workers housing, pimping job brokers both here and abroad, dubious legal status and hence limited protections, profiteering landlords, pampered wealthy being clean up after; it all adds up to an old story, really.

Manufactured Landscapes

Just before leaving town for some time away, I saw Manufactured Landscapes, a documentary about Edward Burtynksy’s photographs of the human exploitation of the planet. The movie was so-so: Burtynsky was rather full of himself, so the filmmaker could have used some distance, but the themes were wide. We’re the only animal that has no sense of balance: we live wantonly. While the culturally dominant view of nature is as a competition, this view is woefully ignorant of all the many forms of cooperation manifested in the natural world. And in our destructive, unsustainable frenzy to chop, mine, burn, eat, & scour, we are so incredibly out of balance that the tipping point, to return a phrase, seems imminent.

Reading David Harvey’s Brief History of Neoliberalism, so the film’s concentration on China (endless factories producing consumer junk, toxic dumps recycling electronic garbage, and the Ozymandian Three Gorges Dam) was a propos. There’s hardly a finer example of neoliberalism’s authoritarian essence.

Alas, poor China. For the people and culture of Tibet, for those in Darfur, Burma, and Zimbabwe, whose leaders are all propped up by Beijing, and for the millions of Chinese themselves debased by the currupt dictatorship of the Party, next year's Olympics are anathema. Shame on all who participate, and all who profit.