Has anyone on the list read Mike Davis' most recent, the Planet of Slums book? I just finished it and am writing a review, and was wondering how it was received in this millieu... Jim Straub
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No, but I just read a review at Verso with a very brief excerpt.
It suddenly occurred to me that the US turned all of Baghdad, and other cities in Iraq into these kind of urban slums---more or less following the Israeli masterplan for Palestine. And the consequence, completely disfunctional civil authority, roving paramilitary death squads, check-point thugs, protection racket ethno-religion factions, choppers and jets flying sorties night and day, blasting away at the population below. (I know, well, Duh, Chuck!)
I guess I was so infuriated at the US for starting a completely meaningless war, it actually blinded me to the consequences. Bush is right, Baghdad is the War on Terror. Terrorize the hordes.
In an interview with Davis at ZMag:
``The great, sprawling slums on the outskirts of Third World cities neutralize much of Washington's baroque arsenal.
The careful analysis of this problem has led military strategists to a different geopolitical worldview than the rest of the Bush administration. Instead of an overarching terrorist conspiracy or axis of evil, war planners focus on the primacy of terrain, the slum itself.
The enemy--which the Pentagon conceives as an eclectic array of potential opponents, ranging from street gangs and radical groups to ethnic militias--is less important than his labyrinth...''
So, if I can take it up from there, the old US School of the Americas, who brought us the death squad as a concept of democracy, will or already has been replaced with the new, urban slum upgrade. I wonder if the graduates get a few months OJT in Baghdad?
Well, I think I can see where the future of the empire lays in this: the care, protection and feeding of all those neoliberal manquiladors sprinkled around the planet that make everything from my computer to my underwear. It seems to me, someday soon these vast slums will go after the gated industrial communities that house these little onclaves of the neoliberal productivity, and not be content to simply murder, screw and extort each other.
So, if the slums start to threaten these onclaves (or even if they don't), the US will be happy to supply the local government a complete package for a nice stiff fee, probably a WB or IMF credit line only good for anti-terrorism programs. The US will probably insist on it as condition of some trumped up economic trade crap. And by the way, weren't many of the air strikes that Israel just inflicted on Lebanon, directed in these kinds of urban slum districts?
Didn't the Peruvian slums in Lima already re-appropriate their water supply from some US jackoff company like Bechtel? I forget. I seem to remember some of the provinces in India did the same thing with the Enron engineered privatized take-over of public utility electricity production. California is still living with the political fallout of all that rightwing crap that put the Schwarz in power---a yet to be investigated money trail that leads from LA back to Houston, Enron, Delay, Abramoff, et al---with Northern California Indian gaming casino money mixed in there some where.
The last time I was in LA was in the early 90s. I was there for legal conference assisting some disabled rights lawyer (aid, secretary, traveling friend). We stayed downtown and had to take a paratransite service to Loyola Law School which was on the border of the old East LA district. So we drove through east side downtown. We were going by early in the morning and passed street after street of people sleeping on double matresses, cardboard, blankets, etc, wall to wall, block after block on the old wide sidewalks. I was amazed at the sheer volumn.
It sounds like a good book.
CG