Via The Man in the Grey Turtleneck, Fortune:

Unknown attackers have blown up part of an Iraqi pipeline that pumps crude oil from Kirkuk oil fields to the Turkish export terminal, Ceyhan, a senior Iraqi oil official and a shipping agent said Wednesday.

The official said the pipeline blast was “catastrophic” as it caused huge quantities of crude oil to spill into the Tigris River.

It isn’t known yet how long it will take the Iraqi authorities to repair the damaged pipeline.

Well, “catastrophic” for whom?  Read more 

I went to the Mall yesterday and bought a copy of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. It only took my an entire afternoon via public transportation, since, of course, buses run every hour, I suppose not to impede the tens of thousands of cars using the public roads. And the mall 1. doesn’t even have any fucking sidewalks!

Anyhow, the book is wonderful, illuminating, terrifying. You should—must—go buy it and read it immediately if you want us all to be able to start thinking strategically instead of reacting to each shock as it comes, and the next one is coming; that panting sound you hear in the dark is the wingers, waiting for it. (Despite being long, and heavily footnoted—footnotes are anti-authoritarian, since they enable you to check sources—the book is quite readable. It is not an academic work, though it is analytical). Shock Doctrine integrates all the economic and political shards of my own life since I came of age; and also integrates and vindicates many of the themes and memes and sense-making tools that we’ve been home-brewing in the blogosphere in the years since Bush seized power.

So what I’m going to do, over the next several days—or more than several, the book is long—is read TSD from front to back, and fair-use quote and annotate passages that I find especially suggestive, in a series of posts. (In the beginning, everything seemed suggestive. Even from the first few pages, the sense I had of conceptual doors opening—that I could finally take a mental walk-through of the ground plan for the Green Zone I know I’ve been trapped in—was exhilirating. Even if many of the walls are of cold stone, many of the windows are barred and high up, many of the corners are dark, and even though the sound of screaming comes from behind some of the closed doors.* (TSD’s impact is such that it makes everything else look like The Process Dodge.)

That said, pages 4-6:  Read more 

(Needless to say, “Think” is in the imperative mood.) Inspired by Naomi Klein:  Read more 

Historical antecedents:

The link between conspiracy theories and oppression is as old as racial conflict. Some early American slaves were convinced that their new owners were cannibals bringing them to the New World to eat their flesh. In Washington in the nineteen-eighties, there was often talk in poorer black communities about The Plan. This was a belief that the “white power structure” had a secret scheme to inexorably move the black population out of the District. Similarly, in shelters in Louisiana and Texas you heard the suspicion that the “higher powers” of New Orleans wanted to employ a policy of citywide gentrification through natural disaster, that a mass exile of poor African-Americans was “the silver-lining scenario.”

The best-known writer to come from the Ninth Ward is Kalamu ya Salaam. A poet, playwright, and civil-rights activist, Salaam used to go by the name of Val Ferdinand. When I told Salaam what I was hearing in New Iberia and Houston, he laughed, but not dismissively. He said, “The real question is why not?” He recalled that in 1927, in the midst of the worst flooding of the Mississippi River in recorded history, the white city fathers of New Orleans—the men of the Louisiana Club, the Boston Club, and the Pickwick Club—won permission from the federal government to dynamite the Caernarvon levee, downriver from the city, to keep their interests dry. But destroying the levee also insured that the surrounding poorer St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes would flood. Thousands of the trappers who lived there lost their homes and their livelihoods. The promise of compensation was never fulfilled. That, plus the persistent rumors of what may or may not have happened during Hurricane Betsy, Salaam said, has had a lingering effect. “So when I heard on TV that there was a breach at the Seventeenth Street levee, I figured they’d done it again,” he said. “Or, let’s just say, I didn’t automatically assume that it was accidental.”

The genius of the Conservative Movement has been not to wait for disaster, but to create it—and profit from it. As we shall see.

We’re all niggers now, eh?

* * *
For you CTers out there, and those of you who are merely foily, what you are about to read connects the dots better than anything I’ve read yet (via the utterly essential and lingerifique Avedon, the Goddess-like being who puts the aggravation in aggregation). Jane Smiley reviews Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine (which I must read at once), and summarizes Klein’s thesis.* I’m going to fair-use a lot of it here:  Read more 

Aqui is an mp3 that is supposedly Allende’s last words. My Spanish really sucks, so I have no idea if it’s real. But I’m just going to run with the translation I found over at Moon of Alabama which is a really informative blog if you’ve not read it before and worth some time, particularly the comments, which are very lively and link-rich. Anyway, the coffee is just kicking in, and this made me really tear up:

Surely, this will be the last opportunity for me to address you. The Air Force has bombed the antennas of Radio Magallanes. My words do not have bitterness but disappointment. May they be a moral punishment for those who have betrayed their oath: soldiers of Chile, titular commanders in chief, Admiral Merino, who has designated himself Commander of the Navy, and Mr. Mendoza, the despicable general who only yesterday pledged his fidelity and loyalty to the Government, and who also has appointed himself Chief of the Carabineros [paramilitary police]. Given these facts, the only thing left for me is to say to workers: I am not going to resign!

Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life. And I say to them that I am certain that the seeds which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever. They have force and will be able to dominate us, but social processes can be arrested by neither crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history.

Workers of my country: I want to thank you for the loyalty that you always had, the confidence that you deposited in a man who was only an interpreter of great yearnings for justice, who gave his word that he would respect the Constitution and the law and did just that.  Read more