before i forget

The WB wants your feedback. If you are any good at any of this do give them a holla. We don't want to just be bitching, do we now?

zoellick makes me regurgitate my own vomit

Why is the World Bank in the news so much this last week? Especially internationally and energetically running around the globe, giving away money, and asking for more funds to lend to the developing world? Building power stations, demanding more support to subsidize rising food prizes and generally appearing as good global citizen numero uno. And why is the WB telling you at the same time that the US economy is going down the tubes and that the rest of the world will follow. No, this is definitely not the carrot and stick strategy. No, it's not the WB telling you that you are so far up shit creek, that only the latest technocratic babyhawk, who accidentally happens to happily row by in his shit dingy, can pull you out of the putrid cesspool of international finance. What is surprising about this is, that Zoellick thinks the WB's main task is the fight against world poverty, when little old me thought they are responsible for it.

I get sidetracked. So why is Zoellick, my knight in shining armor galloping around the globe on his steel-horse? Why is the shit stuck to his boots appearing to be marginally if not magically cleaned off by a recent stint at Goldman Sachs? After years of being a good Bush clan henchman, suddenly a clean little boy is presented to us as the savior of the masses, worried about their caloric output and intake. Ah, that's right, Wolfowitz is out and Zoellick is the new Bu-shite at the helm of the WB. We need some PR, and fast!

No time to waste to throw some money at the poor brothers, never mind that debt servicing cost the third world 540 Billion USD in 2006. Let us increase the high-risk loans (not at all similar to ARMs here) to high-risk debtors, asking for high-risk premiums (no, not like ARMs either), and suing them if they do not pay up (well, taking their planes or ships - when they land in our ports trying to sell their meager harvest at our subsidized dumping prizes - because we don't want their mud huts). Did you know that the surviving Rwandans are at this moment paying of the machetes that were used to chop of their sisters, brothers, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters limbs one by one (financed by and now being payed off to Credit Lyonnaise; produced, sold and shipped by China)? I know this is completely unbelievable, falls under the term "odious debt" and if you do not believe me => JFGI. I for one would prefer to spend the US Offensive Budget on debt relief as opposed to buying cluster bombs for Israel.

It doesn't strike me as strange at all, that when I first heard about Zoellick loving the 4 gigawatt power station in India, I immediately and instinctively was overcome by overwhelming nausea (the German "Brechreiz" is so much more descriptive of this condition). I had not been tracking Wolfowitz's Fenstersturz, news such as this is hard to track in the US, nobody reports it, and so I thought Zoellick was just a footsoldier. Now my lily-livered liberal soul is, if not surprised, at least and unfortunately justified in its disgust with the status quo yet again. What really annoys me is that I do not see an article such as this in the NY Times or anywhere else for that matter (www.marx.com doesn't count). Here is today's front page of the times:

Tasteful, eh?

And do not dare to tell me that I should go to the WB myself and change the system if I am so disgusted by it. You know just as well as I do that one such as I is not allowed into those hallowed halls of world corruption. In order to enter, one must first sell one's soul then cut off one's own cojones and generally cease to be a human being - all done voluntarily of course. Which would usually make me pity the babyhawks, but since they induce eruptious, uncontrollable vomiting, I do not. I get tired of having to clean up my keyboard and computer monitor after each article that I read.

zoellick makes me vomit in my own mouth

Please see my post a little lower. Somehow “I told you so”, just doesn’t say it right. There was hope; as usual it was a false hope, that maybe my future would be considered. Unsurprisingly, the fat cats and the big hats think only of their checkbooks, which I am sure aren’t fat and big enough by any standards. And the bastard Zoellick dares to try disguise it by saying that he just wants to hook up his poor brothers in India with some power. How many solar panels can you buy with four billion dollar? In case you are trying to answer that question; it does not matter, because that would mean decentralized energy production, which is not under the control or part of the profit scheme of Herr Zoelick and his henchmen. Ergo, it won’t happen.

It boggles the mind, to know that locally produced and used renewable power is possible, viable and just bloody smarter, than pumping out four gigawatt of power via burning a lot of coal and shipping it from one end of a country to another. California Edison is about to install 6.5 Million SQF of Solar panels on commercial buildings in Southern California. That power feeds directly into the grid, no need for mile long cables that loose power and cause cancer. What does the World Bank do? Thinking of your welfare is certainly not it. Maybe they need an Austrian at the top, instead of a babyhawk.

Do you know how much water a four gigawatt power station uses? I don’t, but I bet you anything in the world that the fat cat’s cousin is already rubbing his hands together in anticipation of the profits from selling water to poor Indians because the naturally occurring water is sucked up by his cousin’s power station.

Do you know how much CO₂ belches out of the smoke stack of a power plant like that? I don’t, but I am telling my friends to sell their beach front property. It’s a good thing I don’t have any Bangladeshi friends, because I would just have to tell them to go &@%$ themselves, like Zoellick just did, since their whole country is so low that it qualifies as beach front property. Except it ain't a beach you want to be on. They recycle your crappy scrap metal on it. I guess the alternative for them would be to just move on out, get themselves some property on Fifth Avenue, start lobbying their local congressman to build more power stations in India and China, hope that increased entropy in our climate system will not affect us on our fair and far away shores, and wait for Armageddon. Oh, I forget, they don’t have any money. I guess it's back to option one, “You and your children can go &@%$ yourselves!”

“Zoellick, are you familiar with the term Armada Storms?” I know you are not, so JFGI baby!

rannofo

The river Rannofo is in the south of India. Four tributaries pay their nasty tribute to this once mighty giver of life in a great churning mass of chemical processes kicked off by various reactive particles at the more aggressive end of the Periodic Table of Elements. The levels of pollution in the tributaries are not unusual by Indian, Asian or even global standards of water pollution. One of them, the Supar, is a muddy cesspool with the olfactory properties of one of those Yellowstone mud-holes, the ones that smell like a million stink bombs had been thrown into a vast vat of vapors-inducing vapidity by especially ugly redheaded stepchildren. The second one used to be called Viriditas, the Greening Power. Today nobody remembers why it was called Viriditas. It greens no more, and nobody remembers when people started calling it something else. The new name cannot be mentioned in polite company or in front of your mother. The third one is not really a river anymore. It is not a tributary in the natural sense, where water happily springs forth from a meadow in the high Alps, or seeps out of the ground in a swampy sweet smelling marsh with dragonflies buzzing and little birds flying lazy loops in the air. It used to be all that. But now its headwaters are the spouts of a mighty coal burning power station, that produces four Gigawatt of electricity. The financing of which was approved by the World Bank on Monday April 7th, also known as the day that humanity signed its own death warrant. The fourth tributary is on fire more days than not.

Originally, I set out to write this story as a metaphor of hope in the tenacity of humanity and our amazing ability to survive horrible situations. The four tributaries would miraculously clean each other up in this great churning mass of chemical reaction. I wanted to brush the cobwebs of my old mental periodic table, and come up with a process where this becomes reality. But now that I set all the ugly veritas down on paper, I don’t want to anymore. Because if I do, somewhere some idiot will take it as a metaphor, not of destruction and willfulness, but of some magical way that we will by pure chance happen upon, enabling us to pollute the living daylights out of our home planet and happily survive in a clean world anyway. Well, it won’t so I don’t.

Your little future Gandhi of the green movement will not bath in the soothing waters of the Rannofo (orig. ran-more-four => Ranmofo => mama would wash my mouth with soap, so => ran-no-four => Rannofo), and will not discover nature’s wonderful self-cleansing ways, and will not apply his newly found idea of green resistance the world over, and will not save humanity from itself.

Instead he will die of a large amount of chemically induced ailments at a very young age. His parents knowing the reasons for his death, but nevertheless powerless to stop it, will not be able to find recourse from the polluters. The polluters are the whole entire world, and how do you sue something like that? The financiers at the World Bank, the planners of factories, the consumers of products, the drivers of cars and the users of cloth driers. It is one giant tragedy of the commons, and that description has never more hit the last nail in our coffin right on the bloody head.