So far as most of us can tell, the “economic stimulus” plan issuing from The Office Of The President-Elect (snicker) includes the most staggeringly pants-pissing amounts of cash to prop up failing corporations, banks and executives, and jack for the rest of us, unless we’re prepared to summon up some cajones and engage in a little good old-fashioned shop-floor smackdown, like those laid-off screen-door plant workers in Michigan.

On the local level, here in DC, as Inauguration Day – or, as now known to some, Barack Obama Day – approaches, The One’s economic stimulus program for DC has finally begun to jell; according to The Office Of The President-Elect (smirk), this plan will take a two-pronged approach: one prong for the quite well-off, and another big prong for the rest of us…

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So, while I’m just finishing choking down the news about the DC Gummint – at the urging of Fox Channel 5 News — trying to sock the ANSWER Coalition with a fine for exercising basic Constitutional rights, I get a mailing from Rob Naiman’s “Just Foreign Policy” list mentioning that their Iraqi Deaths Estimator has just rolled over a million. That’s right, a million Iraqi dead since the “Shock’n'Awe” of March 2003 — or 1,012,979, to be exact, as I write this.

That’s right, one Friggin’ MILLION. Jesus Herbert Walker Christ. And that’s not counting the million and a half or more Iraqis this nation murdered with sanctions throughout the 1990s (nobody died when Clinton lied? My ass.).

I’d been noticing lately that Fox News hasn’t spent a whole lot of time reporting on Iraq because, y’know, there just isn’t any goddamn’ good news coming out of that goddamn’ place, unless you count some oft-repeated DoD press release mentioning that the Army has rebuilt some goddamn’ stretch of highway from the airport (that they bombed the piss out of just a while back).

Yeah, when your Empire’s crumbling, the outrage and dissatisfaction are so palpable you can cut ‘em with a goddamn’ knife, the one thing you need your press to be doing is exposing the nefarious doings of bands of left-wing wheatpasters defacing the Seat Of Our Empire with free expression.

Left-wing posters? In OUR Capital?

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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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Continue reading "The Colonist: Knocking the Cover Off It for DC Statehood" »

For a number of years in high school and college, one of my big dreams was to take over Herblock’s job at the Washington Post — or, perhaps, to hit the front page in the Post’s Style/Arts section. Needless to say, as my work took a more radical turn, I realized that my chances of making the Arts page — let alone becoming the successor to Herblock — were slim at the very best, and I got a little more realistic and focused my attention to creating cover cartoons for the Yipster Times or trying to break into High Times or Rolling Stone.

So, imagine my surprise when I found myself the subject of a front-page “personality profile”-type story appearing on the front page of the Post Style section a good twenty-odd years after my giving up on the idea of ever breaking into the Post at all. The Post had done a couple of previous Style profiles on local antiglob/antiwar movement figures, and apparently, now, it was my turn; it turns out that a certain Post reporter who’d been covering the local movements since Seattle had been a fan of my work for quite awhile, ever since it began appearing with regularity, wheatpasted on DC’s streets beginning with the original “Blood For Oil” series during Iraq War I.

It was with a mixture of surprise and ironic glee, then, that I found myself and my work “writ large” on the front page of the lifestyle section of a major US city daily, getting top billing over — of all people — Catherine Deneuve (ooh la-la) and Robert Duvall. I was even more surprised to see myself getting an even-handed, quite positive treatment, as I was worried at how I’d be portrayed in print after seeing how the op-ed columnists were savaging the anti-globalization movements ever since Seattle/WTO and A16.

Story by David Montgomery; photographs by Andrea Bruce Woodall.
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