Aug 20, 2008

Welcome to the greasy chute

The Georgian crisis provided Senator Obama--"our candidate"--with the perfect opportunity to be a statesman, tell everyone to calm down, and call for some foreign policy initiatives for peace and mediation and global discussion rather than absolute limpness and passivity.


Even after a vacation week to think about it, he was unable to provide a call for "change." This tells me that his foreign policy advisers--and they are legion, close to 300 by an estimate I saw-- are going to caution the same old baloney Democratic strategy--which by default is cowardly
acceptance of
Neo-conservative crony capitalism, plutocracy, American Exceptionalism, Empire, and as we now are learning, the first benign stages of fascism. Have you heard about how the City of Denver is preparing to handle "protest"? And you thought NYC was bad 4 years ago.


When I was in Denver recently, at the end of July, I heard rumors that the Denver Police were going to park the protesters in "protest pens." Now we have discovered through the Denver underground and above ground press that the Colorado National Guard has commandeered some motels on the outskirts of downtown to use for barracks, and that a detention center has been prepared (thanks to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! for reporting this) in an old warehouse owned by the city of Denver. In the warehouse are pens made of cyclone fencing topped with razor wire and posted signs that
tazers are used in the facility. The warehouse has no air conditioning.


In fact, the warehouse was empty because the city, which stored voting machines in it, had to move the voting machines because they would get overheated. I'm telling you, these are the first sign of benign
fascism. We will have an American twist to it. Welcome to the the greasy chute, Citoyens!