Hammer Mill Days

That's one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, now go, cat, go! Don't you step on my... ah, what's the use? Can't do covers... even when I'm panhandling. Welcome back. I almost said "to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill," but I caught myself in time. Actually, our august squat house is now, indeed, abandoned... in the sense that there is now no one in it. Yes, friends... our new extra-terrestrial mayor, Gizmandiar , has made good on his threat to evict us - call it a down payment on the opportunistic election campaign he's planning for this fall. This fucker's racking up empty promises so fast, you could swear he was born on the planet earth. (In fact, never having seen this creature, I can't say for certain that he wasn't.) Everywhere you turn in this town now, it's Gizmandiar's doing this, and Gizmandiar's in favor of that.... and one of those things he's doing is enforcing building codes and vagrancy ...

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 a...