Armed Madhouse

Yesterday, I read Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse. On the one hand, it’s nice to know that I intu­itively under­stood the neo-conservative inva­sion plan and rea­son — the so-called “Plan B” — well enough to describe it as “glob­al­iza­tion by force” in a paper I wrote for a Political Economy course. It’s also nice to know the vaunted-but-ignored State Department plan was, essen­tially, the oil indus­try plan, and not all that much less fan­ci­ful (an “inva­sion dis­guised as a coup that would be over in three days” — sure).

The cli­mate chaos unleashed by find­ing large new reserves would make the mere col­lapse of indus­trial civ­i­liza­tion look like a sideshow bagatelle¹

On the other hand, it’s some­what dis­ap­point­ing to have my belief in Peak Oil skew­ered so expertly. The issue is not so much that I believed in it, but rather that there is so much petro­leum in the world as to make both extreme cli­mate change and fur­ther impov­er­ish­ment of the U.S. poor and mid­dle classes essen­tially inevitable.

I don’t, how­ever, sub­scribe to his hand-waving dis­missal of the petrodol­lar the­o­ries for the inva­sion of Iraq, if for no other rea­son than he does the stan­dard “only on the Internet” shuck-n-jive in lieu of any actual counter argu­ment. Yes, Bush wants to devalue the dol­lar against the Euro. That does not include throw­ing the global econ­omy into chaos by let­ting over three bil­lion dol­lars sit idle each day — or worse, come back to the Federal Reserve as coun­tries dropped their dol­lar cur­rency reserves, no longer requir­ing them to trade oil? Because that is what a switch from the dol­lar to the Euro would entail.

Americans really don’t care about free­dom; they don’t really care about lib­erty; they don’t care about any of that.²

After that, the book reaches into the var­i­ous vot­ing scams which allowed Bush to steal the office, again. It cov­ers quite a bit of infor­ma­tion, from Ohio to New Mexico, from the more mun­danely racist lists of vot­ers to chal­lenge to the more “sexy, Hollywoodish” (the book’s term) machine hack­ing. On page 243, I read the fol­low­ing, from an African American who was ille­gally denied the right to vote in 2000 in Tampa, and would have been again in 2004 had Palast’s film­ing crew not shown up to do a story on him:

I went into the place to vote and I was with my son and there were about 40 to 50 other peo­ple around and I got up there to vote and they told me I was a con­victed felon. I told the young lady that I had never been arrested. I’ve never been arrested in my life. I I was in the mil­i­tary for four years and have been in the med­ical field ever since. You can’t even work for a hos­pi­tal being a con­victed felon… I was in the Persian Gulf War in ’91. It’s pretty screwed up how they did me, but what can I say?

I was upset, I was ashamed — with 40 peo­ple around — it made me feel real bad. And I’m just hop­ing I get a let­ter stat­ing, hey, you can vote again, Willie.

I really feel it was bad for African-Americans — but hey, what can we do some­times? What can we do?

At which point I col­lapsed out of my chair with a colos­sal fuck­ing headache behind my left eye­ball. After lying down for a few min­utes to get my bear­ings back (an inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence in itself, BTW), I con­tin­ued read­ing, even­tu­ally com­ing across another cou­ple gems from New Mexico: Governor Bill Richardson (the only Latino gov­er­nor in the U.S.) is the son of a Citibank exec­u­tive and a woman who hails from Mexico City, and the only greater pre­dic­tor of how worth­less your vote is than race is income.

The resis­tance is just wait­ing to be orga­nized³

When this is all finally sorted out, the mid­dle class in gen­eral, and white peo­ple in par­tic­u­lar will have a lot to answer for. It may be us, the younger-types in the work­force today ask­ing for the account­ing. It may be our kids. People will turn back to the last few gen­er­a­tions and ask them: why did you let them get away with all this? Why did you keep your head down, try­ing to not fight them.

We’re all so busy scrap­ing, just try­ing to hang onto our own toys, that they can get away with these kind of colos­sal crimes they’ve been get­ting away with. And while you’re busy try­ing not to get fired, they lynch the black guy next door. And that’s just the progressives/liberals/left.

The self-described “con­ser­v­a­tives” will have more. One thing I don’t want to see, after the fight has been won, is some kind of phony “heal­ing process” where all the bosses get to pre­tend they had noth­ing to do with it — to pre­tend they weren’t right there at the table, waited on by starv­ing peo­ple. Where none of the police can quite remem­ber who was in the K-9 units, and none of the mil­i­tary men can recall who was killing fam­i­lies and rap­ing women in some desert hut, 12,000 miles away.

Ever notice how they never can find the racist cops in those civil rights doc­u­men­taries — the cop who was sic­c­ing the dog on the kid, or the fire­man man­ning the fire hose? That’s what I mean.

1. Robert Newman’s A History of Oil
2. Aaron McGruder, on C-SPAN
3. Ani DiFranco, Millennium Theater