But, I would have changed the title from "Self-serve and slave" to "Self-service and voluntary servitude" to make the construction more parallel and invoke the historical context.  We assume that to slave is to work without compensation, but not only is the involuntary nature of the historical practice of slavery crucial, it's the subordination of one person to another that's determinative.  Indeed, I would argue that we are confronting a twenty-first century variant of an old agenda--to make a significant percentage of the population carry out the dictates of the few, without compensation.

Derrick Jackson offers the following in today's Boston Globe.

Fencing out fields of dreams
By Derrick Z. Jackson
July 15, 2008

SO MUCH for romantic visions of families bicycling together, with little Johnny and Jamila wobbling on training wheels. So much for teens who actually disconnect from Facebook for facetime, community cleanup, and - good heavens - exercise.

No, no, no. Some people are so divorced from society that they see this as almost evil.

While it is being bruited about that the Administration is planning for a somewhat earlier withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, if Secretary Gates is counting on protecting the bases with robots and drones, he might want to think again.

In any event, the United States Air Force is demonstrating lots of enterprise.

As someone who's just returned from a cross-country rail treck from New Hampshire to New Mexico and back, I can tell you that there are a bunch of things we need more than new air bases and fighter planes being taken on European jaunts.  For starters, how about some more track so freigh trains aren't held up by passenger trains and passenger trains aren't shunted aside to let the freight get by.  And how about some over-passes for farm roads so the train whistles don't have to rend the country-side day and night with their caterwauling as they roll by?  Never mind robbing the passengers of their sleep.

Somewhere in western Kansas, as we were about to reach Colorado and the train started its climb to about 6680 feet near Raton, New Mexico, I stopped making notes.  After all, we assumed the freight traffic had been left behind and the Southwest Chief would be able to "fly" to make up some of the four hours we were behind.

It was not to be.  It turned out that two engines were not enough to pull twelve cars over the mountains at speed and overheated so that they had to be shut down and cooled on a siding.  This also meant that there was no electricity for anything on the train and a lap-top with an erratic battery was out of commission.  

While I don't subscribe to the characterization of political candidates as opponents or contestants, like gladiators in the Roman arena, there's little question that many of the promoters and financial supporters of candidates are basically antagonistic to the interests of the general public the candidates are proposing to serve.

So, as a progressive Democrat, I'm not at all reluctant to consider the Republican proponents of authoritarian, patriarchal dictatorship as my enemies.  Moreover, since a significant number of the American people have awakened to the fact that, instead of having their modest expectations and patriotic values honored, the people they elected to represent and serve them have engaged in the grossest deceptions and dishonored the country, it's clear that there's a small class of people who now have a lot to lose.  It would be a mistake to think they will give up power easily.

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition

SPENGLER, writing for the Asia Times in June of 2004 opined
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition

For serious devotees of torture, Washington's embarrassment about Abu Ghraib paled beside the Vatican's defense last week of the Spanish Inquisition. It turns out, reported church officials at a June 15 press conference, that the Spanish Inquisition burnt at the stake less than 1% of the 125,000 accused heretics brought before it. On the strength of this statistic they qualified Pope John Paul II's previous apology for the Inquisition. "A request for forgiveness can only refer to facts that are true and objectively recognized. One does not ask forgiveness for some impressions widely held by public opinion, which contain more myth than reality," said Cardinal Georges Cottier.

Catholic publicists in possession of these data have been campaigning to rescue the Inquisition's good name from the besmirchment of Protestant propaganda. Wrote Prof Thomas F Madden of St Louis University in October 2003: "The Spanish people loved their Inquisition. That is why it lasted for so long."

It seems that what we now consider corrupt, the doling out of public resources and assets to special interests and supporters, was actually the norm until some time after the Second World War, when the responsibilities of public officials, especially our Representative in Congress, to actually serve the public interest were re-enforced by a series of civil rights laws and accountability measures.
So, in a sense, we're not far removed from the establishment of popular rule and the realization of public servants who actually serve the public.  Which probably accounts, in large part, for the persistence of the old pattern of Congress allocating funds on the basis of political considerations and their continued inability to get annual appropriations done on time.

What I wanted to write about this morning was how history has fairly definitively demonstrated that the privatization of the delivery of public goods and services has failed the ostensible purpose of improving quality at a lower cost.

But then, a quick tour through the latest news about the United States Air Force led to a considerable detour.  For, while Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is making speeches about all our military services being more open to civilian critique, some people seem to have gotten the wrong message from his recent efforts.

The latest set-back for the Bush Administration is entitled Boumediene v. Bush and, IMHO, the conservatives are quite correct in being really upset.  Because Justice Kennedy has finally made his point that the Constitution is a limiting document, designed to define and restrict the behavior of the agents of government in exchange for their having been granted the power to use force.  As one of the commenters on the  News Hour pointed out, the implication of the decision reaches much further than the prison on Guantanamo.  In establishing that the Constitution follows the flag, it will affect U.S. government actions all around the globe.

Do not look for any links in this diary.  It is entirely speculative on my part.  However, if correct, it would explain a number of things.

Darrell in Iowa writes:

I am in Mason City.  Our levees broke Sunday morning.  Flood stage is 7 foot and waters are now at 19 feet.  Hundreds of homes and businesses are underwater.  The City's water plant was flooded and the entire city of 30,000 is without potable water.  A couple of hours ago the main electric substation flooded and failed and much of the city is without power.  People remain in flooded homes.  Early tonight I saw people wandering the streets not knowing where to go.  There are entrie areas of the city with NO emergency personnel on hand.

NOBODY from the outside has come to help.  Our local first responders are exhausted and overwhelmed.  Small rural towns downstream tonight are being devasted.  Levees everywhere are failing.  Calls for help in these small towns have been unmet.  Portions of our local guard are in Iraq.

The homeland has been left unprotected and people are suffering horribly.

And no, it's not going to be fixed by firing the two top guys, Michael Wynne and Michael Mosely, for failing to be properly attentive to the disposition and storage of our nuclear arsenal.  Indeed, the response, getting rid of personnel, may well be symptomatic of the real problem--an increasing reliance on machines and electronics in preference to people on the ground.

Perhaps another report that came out on the day of the firings provides a clue.  The executive summary of what caused the destruction of one of our twenty-one stealth bombers isn't very long, so I'm going to share the whole thing.

The Independent says it's a secret, but we know that it's not.  We've been talking about the planned United States bases in Iraq for years (here  and here  and here)
and our governments have been negotiating them for decades.  After all, basing rights, like those we have in Japan and South Korea and Kosovo and Germany and Great Britain and Kuwait and Qatar and Yemen, is what we were trying to get Saddam Hussein to agree to when we helped him with Iran and provided chemical weapons to control the fractious Kurds.  As an alternative, Saudi Arabia obviously didn't work out because of its religious orientation.  The secular Iraq would have been ideal if Saddam Hussein had been more co-operative and used his powers of eminent domain to provide a home for U.S. Air Force missile, radar and monitoring installations.

Calling Guam a Pacific Paradise is perhaps a bit over-blown.  This island, at the southern end of the Mariana chain, is reported to have  lost much of its native fauna to the predations of the brown snake and one third of its territory is already under the jurisdiction of the United States military.  But it could be a paradise, especially if future military activity is more protective of the environment than it has been in the past. We surely don't want to see a repetition of what's happened to Tarawa, one of the 24 small islands that make up the Republic of Kiribati.

Sixty eight thousand dollars is the latest estimate of the cost of a hellfire missile, the preferred weapon with which the Air Force "takes out" hostile pick-ups and the hapless Iraqis whose heat signature has been detected by the hunter drone.

That's not what the hellfire was designed for.  This video purports to demonstrate what one does to a howitzer. Problem is, Iraqi insurgents ride around in pickup trucks.

When I woke up this morning, I intended to just make this about Hillary Clinton, the war-monger, in contrast to Barack Obama, the peace-monger.  That's because I agree with the Jed Report assessment that Iraq is the central issue in Hillary Clinton's fall from grace.

After all, on one of her very first visits to New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton was as clear as could be:

"If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from."

That's what I heard her say in Dover, New Hampshire in February of 2007.  And then she followed that up with an indictment of one of Iran's military contingents in the following October, suggesting she's just itching for a fight.

Let me start by admitting that this diary is highly speculative and I would appreciate any factual corrections and contradictions that address my admittedly fallible memory.

While I was well into my adulthood in the 1960s and fully aware of the spate of assassinations that threatened to draw the United States into the category of third world regimes or "developing" nations, and while I never fully bought into the explanation that the removal of national leaders was accomplished by apparently irrational individuals acting on their own, I didn't buy into the conspiracy theories either--for the simple reason that my own mother-in-law covered that particular territory for our whole family all by herself.

Besides, the single nut theory of political assassination was apparently preferred by those most intimately affected.