This Just In: Castro Not Dead

Surprising and angering the United States Government once again, Fidel Castro has refused to croak for what is perhaps the 100^th time. Scholars in the audience may note that Castro has a long history of not dying. Since the early days of his revolutionary career, people have been trying to off him, and he has time and again refused.

During his ill fated attempt to topple the government of the Dominican Republic, his boat was shot out of the water and his fellow guerillas were captured and killed. Fidel, evidently unwilling to die even at such a young age, turned around and swam the 12 miles back to the southern coast of Cuba.

Later, he and a group of 160 rebels attacked the well-guarded Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba and were met by 400 soldiers. Under the withering machine gun fire, Fidel and his lieutenants made a hasty retreat, leaving most of the men to be tortured and killed in the dungeons of the compound. Castro was captured by the police, tried, and sentenced to death for his role in the attack, but just at that time, Batista, the profoundly unlucky U.S. backed dictator outlawed the death penalty and Castro’s sentence was commuted to imprisonment.

After being freed and exiled from Cuba, Castro made the crossing from Mexico in a leaky and overloaded luxury yacht filled with guns and 81 other revolutionaries. After being decimated by the air force and abandoning most of their supplies, 12 of the 81 including Fidel, Raul, and Che made it to the Sierra Maestra mountains. They spent the next years in the jungle, building up the armed movement and skirmishing in the surrounding countryside, eventually overthrowing the Batista government with the help of urban revolutionaries.

Once in power after the 1959, Castro had to contend with constant challenges from within, some of them from fellow communists and some from counterrevolutionaries hoping to reverse the changes he had instituted. Armed resistance organizations operated in the mountains and cities of Cuba well into the 1970’s, and all of them hoped to end Castro’s long streak of not being killed.

The Kennedy administration was also vexed by Castro’s unwillingness to die, and his CIA trained and deployed a force of some 3000 Cuban exiles to overthrow the regime. Castro himself met them at the beach, and he and some 75,000 regular army and militiamen expressed their desire to live to the arriving invaders. The 2000 or so who survived were apparently quite convinced by the sincerity of Castro’s explanation.

Kennedy’s successors having evidently forgotten this forceful exposition continued their attempts to bury Castro. For decades, he successfully dodged a barrage of assassins’ bullets, bombs, and exploding cigars while going about his business.

In recent years, his principal enemies have been uneven staircases and old age. With Castro’s increasing senility many assumed that he would one day forget not to die.

When he took a header during a public appearance and was immobilized for several months, many in Miami and Washington were hopeful that his injuries would prove fatal. Fidel did not cooperate however.

Just this year when Castro’s health took a turn for the worse, the whole world held its breath with the expectation that he would soon expire. That he has not is a continuing disappointment to the Bush Administration which hopes to be allowed to fuck Cuba up as badly as it has fucked up Iraq.

Tearful prayers and expansive “Transition Plans” may all go to waste if the Bearded One does not hurry his departure to the great sugar plantation in the sky. I for one would hope he holds out until we have somebody competent in the White House, but the possibility of Fidel living forever makes me careful what I wish for. With any luck, two years will be enough.

Warning: Don't Believe Me

Alright, I’ll admit it. I am biased.

But so are you, and more importantly, so are all the pundits you watch on TV and read in the newspaper.

At the most basic level, we are all biased in our own favor. I don’t go around saying that I should be taxed more heavily or that my civil liberties should be suspended for the sake of the state. People may believe that others should pay more taxes, that others shouldn’t be allowed to say and do certain things, but very few of us are stupid enough to explicitly attack our own economic or political status.

In the same way, media outlets and journalists don’t go around saying that their information collection is deeply flawed or that people shouldn't trust them as their only source of news. In fact, they say just the opposite. They make themselves out to be credible, unbiased, and authoritative.

OK, let’s take those one at a time.

Credible? Well, that depends. Do you like unidentified sources? How about reporters who fake stories or play up sensational but irrelevant details (see astronaut in diapers)?

Unbiased? Raise your hand if you know which 24 hour news channel is the Republican channel. The Democratic outlets are less aggressive in their ideological evangelism, but they are no less stubborn when it comes time to pound certain “truths” into our brains.

Authoritative? The “all the news that’s fit to print” attitude of most news outlets is betrayed by their clearly selective reporting. A cute white girls getting kidnapped is a story for days, but the thousands being gang raped and murdered in African civil wars count themselves lucky to receive a moment of silence on the evening news.

The media is an information filter. If you are a passive consumer of media, it chooses what information you receive and what you do not. This in turn affects what you believe about the world and how you identify your place in it.

As a result of our continued reliance on too few sources of information, our understanding of the intentions and policies of our leaders is hopelessly muddled.

Consider that the vast majority of Americans believe that they are in the “middle class.” That is to say, people with incomes from $30,000 to $300,000 a year identify as part of the same socioeconomic group. That they are incorrect from a sociological standpoint is no matter. Their beliefs and identities have been shaped by a standard social perspective beamed into their homes and classrooms since childhood.

This confusion, what the communists might call a breakdown of class consciousness, allows modern politicians to make appeals to the “middle class” (meaning you) advocating policies that favor the elite (meaning them) in the guise of helping the poor (meaning the people you look down on). Insane drug policy, excessive regulation, wars, poorly targeted foreign aid, and the general ossification of our political system can all be viewed through this lens.

Until all media comes with warning labels like packs of cigarettes ("Warning: Viewing this program may result in smallmindedness, the inability to distinguish truth and lies, and cancer)it’s our job as responsible citizens and consumers of media to challenge their assertions of impartiality and with them the doctored images of the world we’ve been given.

The Economics of Empire: Why nobody really cared when Bremer lost $9,000,000,000.

If a private company noticed that 363 tons of U.S. currency had gone missing, they would be alarmed right? Not so with the government. It can just print some more.

Everybody remembers the images of U.S. troops passing out greenbacks in Baghdad back in 2003. It turns out these were not just isolated incidents, but part of a concerted effort to buy the “hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people. All across the country, U.S. soldiers and CPA officials were handing out hundreds like party favors, paying people for lost property and relatives, and using cash to compensate contractors submitting bills into the millions of dollars.

What we would consider outrageous waste and criminally negligent accounting back home are just part of running an empire.

You see, in Iraq the greenback is nothing but monopoly money. Their price system and domestic markets are sufficiently insulated from world currency exchanges that the Treasury is actually quite free to run the printing press. The important part for you future emperors to remember is that the increase in money supply is accompanied by a corresponding increase in the number of people who do business in dollars. So long as Iraqi markets operate in dollars and keep it out of the U.S. there is no problem. Money for nothing.

Money printing is horribly inflationary under normal circumstances, but due to Iraq’s economic isolation, the effect is distributed over a longer period of time as cash slowly filters back into the international market.

The so-called “inflation tax,” the gradual erosion in the value of the dollars we all hold, allows the Bush administration to come out in favor of tax cuts while still shoveling cash into the Sunni Triangle. That Congress is cut out of the deal is just gravy for the administration.

The effects will be felt for years, but the extra nickel you pay every time you go to the grocery story will be impossible to trace back to the Commander in Thief.

Brilliant.