Genocide Games

Putting aside the International Olympic Committee (IOC), one of the more corrupt organizations in recent history, and the Chinese state, both one of the more corrupt and most repressive (corruption + army) nations in existence, we are presented with two arguments for the Genocide Olympics: that “the Games,” as the dopefest/nationalist frenzy/commercialized spectacle is called, shouldn’t be politicized; and that the athletes, the poor athletes, have spent their whole lives waiting for this moment and shouldn’t be denied.

Not politicized? The whole point is political; China’s hosting, as it’s so endlessly repeated, for its “coming out” party on the world stage. It’s a propaganda exercise for them, plain and simple. Not to speak of the rank nationalism, as every nation grasps for medals like the brokers in a scrum over the money thrown into the trading pit by Abbie Hoffman & Co. And speaking of money, with the billions in sponsorship and advertising, it’s all about the reactionary politics of international capitalism.

But what of the athletes? Isn’t the real question why should the rest of us care about them? When did a few thousand excellent specimens get to dictate world events and traduce human rights? Does their egoism have the remotest equivalence to the raped, tortured, and murdered in Tibet, Darfur, and Burma, not to speak of the prison camps and other manifestations of repression in the host nation? There was a piece on Genocide Games-bound BMX riders on NPR the other day: so rad, they’re stoked, dude! So’s NBC. Show ‘em the money; they’ll need it wash off the blood.

Why

Why did she vote for Bush’s war? Clinton says she didn’t know then what she knows now. Does anybody believe this? Twenty-three other Senators knew something then, and they voted against the war. Plenty of us outside of the Senate Club said Bush’s war would be: a mistake, illegal, imperialist, nothing to do with 9/11, a disaster in the making, and a blood-bath to come. So what the hell didn’t she know? Where were her vaunted smarts, competence, & experience when it really meant something? Tens of thousands killed, a tab in the trillions, a generation maimed, bloated war-profiteering, a nation dismembered, a region made more instable, unprecedented Presidential power, and no end in sight. And she is one of the responsible ones.

Does anyone really doubt that she voted yes because she was thinking of her political career, her viability, her run for President, and little else? The war was, after all, supposed to be quick and easy, relatively painless (for “our” boys and girls); a yes vote was also supposed to be quick and easy, certainly painless in the face of the criminal cries of “treason” by the war-party. And the benefits of voting with Bush? It would show she was strong on national defense, a patriot, someone with the toughness to commit other people’s children to war. She was playing by Republican rules, taking the bait hook, line, and sinker. In her otherwise cautious Senate career, Clinton has more than proven that she will support the Pentagon’s grotesquely warping budget and otherwise show she has pro-military balls; a quick little war would be the ne plus ultra of the Clinton tradition of “triangulation,” or absorbing the right’s psychosis as its own, ever dragging the “moderate” into the depths.

Stadium Bullshit

We killed Boomberg’s West Side boondoggle of stadium, but the tab for the new Yankees and Mets stadium is approaching 2.5 billion dollars. The indefatigable Neil deMause is on the beat. About half of that is our money, commonwealth funneled to sky boxes for the rich, and thick wedges of profits for the owners of those teams, and the very, very few lucky boys who make millions playing the game. What a fucking waste. In the Bronx, a public park was sacrificed to private profit. Yankees fans, many of them well-off folks from the ‘burbs, should enjoy the shows to come, knowing the proles will paying for their precious proxy entertainment for generations to come. Sometimes, I really do wish we had a free-market instead of the in-plain-sight thievery that is our state/capitalist model.

China

Corporatists and their politicians have long been telling us that capitalism will democratize China. Bullshit. Authoritarianism and capitalism work hand-in-hand, as the American experience in the 19th century and the Asian Tiger economies of the late 20th show so well. The Chinese elite, a nexus of Communist Party and People’s Army, along with the new bandit kings, likes its power too much to democratize. It’s far too corrupt to allow for any kind of openness. Indeed, there’s so much discontent in the nation that they are terrified of reform, thinking even a little loosening will blew the whole filthy system apart. They will, and have, used the tanks to crush any threats. This is usually phrased by their apologists, who are also often their hirelings (see: Henry Kissinger) as their fear of chaos; what this means is that they know the chaos is aimed at their fat throats.

Unfortunately, Han nationalism remains a potent weapon in the hands of the ruling class. Whenever I hear a man-in-the-street interview with a propaganda-stuffed nationalist in China, I hear their like in America: know-nothing, duped, proudly militant in their ignorance.

Free Tibet. End the genocide in Darfur. Free Burma.

Boycott the Olympics.

RIP Iraq

It’s the fifth anniversary of Bush’s war in Iraq. Nearly 4000 Americans have died, a small proportion of the entire death toll wrought by this madness, but, significantly, those tens of thousands of Iraqi do not count. They aren’t real people, those slaughtered thousands, in the American mind. In addition, two million Iraqis are internally displaced; two million of them live wretched as exiles in surrounding countries. Tens of thousands killed! That damns this war, and this country.

War-monger John McCain was over there the other day, completely complicit in the folly and slaughter, eager to continue on until some undefined “victory.” Whole hog into the neocon fantasy, McCain’s victory is a massive, permanent military presence in the region to safeguard the continued ruin of the planet through oil.

An excellent article on Pakistan: the recent breaking of the feudal landowners’ power; the rise of the middle class; the military’s dawning realization that they bred a monster in Islamic terrorism (lately striking at the military; talk about blowback).

Spitzer

Don’t cry for Spitzer. He was no progressive. These overweening hyper-prosecutors (Rudy G., anyone?) are incredibly dangerous, even when they go after the bad guys. Tom Robbins, whose piece in this week’s Voice is quite good, notes Spitzer’s similarity to the last golden boy prosecutor to ride the political system up, up, and almost away: Thomas Dewey. (As in Dewey Defeats Truman.) In 1936, Dewey became famous for putting away Lucky Luciano, but it eventually developed that he did it crookedly, with perjured testimony. Now, Luciano was undoubtedly a mobster, but that is no excuse for subverting the rule of law. Dewey eventually helped get Luciano out of jail and exiled, perhaps out of his own guilt.
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Now, Patterson sounds much more promising. A progressive, who has long reprsented a poor district that's most African-American, he has a sense of humor. Unheard of in Albany.

Clients 1-8

Who are they?