Almost as if on cue, USA Today, in its classic “everything’s OK, don’t worry, be happy, nothing to see here” fashion, ran a big-ass front-page story this week trumpeting in its headline that the economy was “surging”. Now, if you know anything at all about USA Today — or, as some of us wags call it, USA Hooray — when you see them using words like “surging” in a headline on an economic news story, you can be sure it’s 99 & 44/100% pure bullshit.

But, anyway, assuming you believe USA Today, the economy’s surging again! And, if you checked out the actual breakdown yourself at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you’d see that a pretty good chunk of them are rock-bottom-wage “service” jobs, not including the handful of “freelance” categories you see here — including a newly-emerging job category showing a huge upswing at the end of the month, shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and the Gulf Coasts of Mississippi and Alabama.

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As public outrage over the Bush Regime’s handling of the humanitarian disaster in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina began to grow and spread, I thought it might be a good idea to create a second poster for the upcoming national antiwar mobe based on this theme, to tap into that sentiment and spur more intense involvement in the demonstrations.

At last, here was one that President Chimp and his lapdog Congress and media couldn’t spin their way out of. “I didn’t expect the levees to break”, easily one of the most incredible whopping lame-assed “dog ate my homework” excuses ever, was a comment I couldn’t help laughing at in spite of everything because it was just too damn’ much like watching Saturday Night Live.

So, to help juice up peoples’ attitude at the upcoming events in DC, a little something in solidarity with the dispossessed in Fallujah, Iraq, and her sister city, New Orleans.

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So, anyway, just to recap: we pay more taxes here in DC than many actual states, and have lost far more citizens in places like Vietnam and Iraq. For many a decade now, this city, its citizens and its alleged government have been the Feds’ test bed for its policies in places like El Salvador, Palestine, and Baghdad, and the IMF/WorldBank’s policies in places like Indonesia and Africa.

No control over our budget, no ability to collect taxes on outfits like the World Bank, or on all the suburban yahoos who roll across the river to Washington Nationals home games and kiss off and spit on any folks from DC who show up to publicly speak out on this predicament.

And, oh, yeah; it’s just been leaked that the current budget estimate for shoving an entire neighborhood across the river and building a brand-new monstrous stadium for the ex-Montreal Expos to continue to play suck-ass ball in is now in the billion — with a “B” — dollar “ballpark”.

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This piece originally appeared in an exhibition of cartoons at the Provisions Gallery and Bookstore in Washington DC. During the Q&A in my obligatory “artist talks about his work” appearance at the opening, one concerned art lover asked, regarding this cartoon, whether or not this was really the kind of conservation message I wanted to send, to which I replied “Conservation message? What conservation message?”

This was no gasoline conservation message; this was a comment on the attitude of the millions of American men who were trying to show off how macho they were, “playing soldier” by driving Hummers around their hometowns while, in the meantime, thousands of real soldiers were dying in theirs in Iraq in an attempt to subjugate a nation and steal its resources. By this time, gasoline was nudging the three-dollar-a-gallon mark, and I was getting more than a little bit sick and tired of listening to fat, selfish Americans pissing and moaning about the price of gasoline, as if cheap gas was something they were somehow magically entitled to. I actually found myself rooting for gasoline to hit four or five dollars a gallon — something approaching the prices people have paid for years in Europe — just so I could see all those selfish, arrogant SUV drivers get a bit of well-deserved comeuppance.

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