Next stop.

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