This is the traditional day for celebrating the change of seasons, the harvest, the end of toiling in the fields, the bounty of the Earth, and the enjoyment of work’s happy result.
We can only hope it’s a change of seasons in the sociopolitical sphere as well.
As one potential sign, John Kerry’s come out swingin’, and not just for the mythical “swing voter.”
And on Monday night, Kerry followed his Jon Stewart gig with a 23-minute spot on Letterman. He made a few stinging gags about Halliburton, Ashcroft, Bush’s tax plans, and his own perfect hair. He flung an index card back behind him like Dave used to do. And he gave some serious barbs about the Iraqi puppet regime’s impending collapse, and about how the neocons’ hubris has left the US more isolated and the terrorists more powerful.
He gave a more entertaining performance, and a politically heavier one, than Clinton gave Arsenio Hall in ’92.
MEANWHILE, BACK IN SUPER-MESS-O’-POTAMIA: It might not be true that, as Kerry alleged, the Bushies had “no plan to win the peace.” Canada’s own anti-corporate essayist Naomi Klein claims they’ve had a plan all along—a deliberately brutal scheme of “shock treatment,” intended to impose the purest example of pro-corporate ideology yet seen on the planet. The IMF/World Bank “adjustments” in Latin America and Africa would be just read-through rehearsals, compared to what would be done to (but not necessarily for) Iraq.
As Klein interprets the scheme, the entire Iraqi economy would be sold off to the multinationals, using whatever legal tricks the neocons could write into the puppet regime’s constitution. The alleged site of the ol’ Garden of Eden would become a paradise for investors. As for the Iraqi people: Well, they’d already endured decades of hardship and repression, so a little more wouldn’t stir ’em to revolt.
The problem, as it usually is with attempts to ideologically purify real societies, is that real life refuses to work out according to plan. In this case, the US/UK occupation army never fully pacified all the disparate tribes and sects that wanted a piece of the post-Saddam governance. And few of them were fond of the neocons’ plans for privatizations and mass layoffs. All hell ensued, and continues to do so.
Harper’s still has a wimpy web presence, so I have to link to part of Klein’s essay as retyped by a reader and posted to a political discussion-board site.
