by Lash Marks
(lifted from a comment)

Just attended an international reconstruction conference, actually, a tele-conference on my cell phone, staying late at the office and listening in to urgent young upwardly-mobile largely-white professionals ‘work the process’ around village projects in the 3RDW.

May Satan set aside a special circle in hell for those academics who taught ‘work the process’, and further bloated America’s already corpulent Politburo bureaucracy, at a time when Katrina is already eight months and $35,000M down the FEMA tubes ago, and there are still 650,000 American citizens homeless and 30,000 unaccounted for. But by God let’s earnestly ‘work the process’!

Life has a funny way of digging the knife in, so while I was sitting listening to the debate, the parking garage locked up my vehicle, forcing me to run up and down the boulevard like a lost academic looking for his tenure, asking every person waiting when the next bus was.

Boarding the last bus before dawn for the hour- long ride, I noticed the woman in front of me digging for two quarters, and held two of my own in my hand, just in case. She noticed that, but didn’t ask me, and so we rode the trip together talking about San Francisco in the 1980’s, and all the mind-states that have come back again, like an old speed freak on his daily circuit.

Things are really bad on the street, and you don’t have to work the process to know that. I rode the bus with a nurse who works at the VA hospital mental-health clinic, and we ended up laughing, which is all you can do to ease the pain, at all the homeless Viet Nam veterans who are starting to die off now, their place taken by the gassed and irradiated Gulf War I vets, some ambulatory, some not, now a second wave of Gulf War II vets, most mentally deranged from head wounds and the emotional scars of ‘seeing’.

Things are really, really bad on the streets. Our government talks reconstruction and New World Order, but it’s all no-bid no-action fleecing of all of US, and that’s a simple fact. The Bushites are cutting back on Katrina funds, redirecting reconstruction aid money to cronies, forcing municipal services to declare bankrupcy, cutting back on veteran’s benefits, and cutting back on mass transit, creating mass diasporas greater than Israel’s, at a time when we are fighting and dying, so those same Israeli’s can expand their hotel and time-share capacity, by building on illegally-annexed Palestine land!

It’s a SNAFUBAR cluster-f–k.

Things are really grave on the streets. Most of the world gets by on $0.35 an hour, about $2.00 a day. If they live in the oil-producing states, like Saudi or UAE, where gas is subsidized at near $0.25 a gallon, then life is survivable.

Sat in a tea-house in Dubai last month, drinking $0.10 tea, munching roasted chick peas, watching the world go by at a frantic pace, money pouring in from all over the world, golden towers rising like mushrooms in a not-yet-boiling morning sun.

In other less-affluent countries, oil importers, their governments are going bankrupt trying to subsidize both gas and rice, cooking oil and kerosene, so their indigent population doesn’t starve to death as commodity prices soar under Bernanke’s NotGeld little-engine-that-could.
No wonder Bolivia had to nationalize their gas.

So this ‘working the process’, rebuilding some chicken coop in some backwater in Dafur, hey, it’s a noble thing, but it’s just spitting into the eye of Great Satan. Things are really harsh on the streets.

Talked with a Nepalese guy in this Middle East backwater. He’d answered an ad for a hotel worker, now he owed his airfare, and was living four to a room with nothing to do. He figured it would take a year to work off his airfare to there, then another year to work off his airfare back home again, if the price of fuel didn’t go up. I didn’t have the heart to tell him about Iraq and Iran (and now Bolivia).

On the plane back to Dubai, I met a Phillipino who was working for Halliburton-KBR in Iraq, who said he made so much money in just one year, he was going to build houses and become a landlord after he married his girlfriend back home. I met another guy making six figures for Halliburton, working as an embassy inspector, but mostly just sitting in his compound, initialling paperwork.

I told him about the poor Nepalese guy, and the Indonesian kid I met, who borrows his uncle’s motorcycle to guide tourists, for just enough in tips to pay for the gas, and pay his uncle the rest. How easy it was to become a slave today.

My Halliburton friend just snorted. Tough s–t.

I sat on the bus awhile back with a black guy from New Orleans area. He had come to town to put his oldest son in the ground, then go back to his restaurant out in the bayou. He’d worked his whole life in hard-scrabble hand-to-mouth working for himself, instead of the man. He didn’t have to tell me how easy it is to become a slave in this society. Just look around you.

His place was right in the path of Katrina.

This evening as I walked to the bus, there was a old vet in a wheelchair dragging himself up the steep hill. I asked him if I could help, and, of course, he said he had it. So I told him I had his back, and stayed right behind him until he made the flat. Two passing white people saw me, and soto voce’d, "Did you see what he was doing? How rude!" Then they ducked into a Starbucks.

That’s the world we’ve become since TV began. A world of carefully-educated watchers, of commentators, snide, sarcastic Steven Colbert’s. We’d sooner snort a Simon wise-crack than help an AIDS victim get to their hospice, now that the bus fare has gone up, and routes have been cut back, and the wheels are coming off.

TAKE WITH’s: Call your Congressperson and demand that Bush revoke the oil and gas credits to the big oil companies, and redirect that money to mass transit. Call your Congressperson and demand Bush declare annual dividends for the new Alaskan gas pipeline, and for ANWAR when they eventually drill it. That oil and gas belongs to the people of Alaska, and they deserve a share of the profits, not just some brownfield and a horde of dealers and peelers in their midst. Call your Congressperson and demand that Bush audit BIA and BLM and force the multi-nationals to pay their royalties to US. Direct our share to mass transit and low-income housing. Call your Congressperson and demand that Bush cancel the Mars Mission, and AF2020, and redirect that projected $100,000M’s toward mass transit, urban housing and education. Call your Congressperson and demand that Bush remove FEMA from a DHS/DOD which is sucking US dry. Fire all the generals. Lay off all the astronauts. Terminate all the aerospace death workers.

The jackals and hyenas are laughing in the dark, chittering and yipping as all of US crowd closer around the fire, a fire which is dwindling and guttering out. When the darkness rushes in, as Galbraith wrote, so will the capitalists. Like a pack of wolves, capitalists are fun to watch, as long as you feed them. But faced with their own starvation, or their allegiance to America, they will eat you and me alive in a New York minute.

Work the process, make the change and fight the good fight. You can hear them picking at our ragged margins, and you don’t need an MBA from Yale and a cheerleader megaphone, either.