How shall the Masters of the Universe deal with us? posted by Richard Seymour

Via Le Colonel Chabert, Haitian Government Announces No Voting Stations for Cite Soleil:

[T]he Haitian government has announced it will not be putting any voting stations inside Haiti’s largest poor community, Cite Soleil. The announcement comes just one day after hundreds of Cite Soleil residents took to the streets to demand polling stations. Between 250,000 and 600,000 people live in Cite Soleil. It is widely known as a stronghold for the Lavalas movement of ousted President Jean Bertrand Aristide. Haitian officials said the neighborhood is too dangerous for voting. But a UN official told Reuters voting is feasible in Cite Soleil, pointing out thousands of voters have been registered without incident. Rene Lundi, a local community leader, said: "It is clear they want to prevent us from voting, because they know our vote won't go their way.”

Becuase international capital and the local client elite own Haiti and determine the rules about who gets to vote and why. Because Israel owns Palestine, and can say what is a legitimate government to talk to, and who may vote and why. Because, the US government owns New Orleans and says who gets to have their property back, under what circumstances and why:

So: as far as the platitude providers, faux leftists and provocative trolls are concerned, They don't even have to establish, legally or practically, their possession of the prerogative to dispose of other people's property (property damaged through their criminal negligence which they will, only naturally, steal in recompense). Thus a delicate, risky assault on the laws and ideology of private property right in the US, which even this divinely ordained despot and his court might hesitate to push too far, will not be required. The Bush Crime family and their caporegimes already own the 9th ward, according to the magnanimous volunteer overseers of their disempowered victims. It is a fact universally acknowledged. Due process? Another noisome technicality to be swept aside by the benevolent They Who Decide For Us (with our wise vizierly advice weighed of course). No need to linger over the dull, passé issue of legality; comment must rush forward into fascist utopian dreams.

Right on the money: to speak of the fate of New Orleans as if the people who own those houses, who paid taxes to build those amenities, who lived and worked there are irrelevant except as passive recipients of government largesse (ha!) is to give the federal, state and local government as well as the real estate kings the power to callously dispose of even those rights that we might have taken for granted in a capitalist society. That, just as the society is mounting a fight-back against the city's attempts to flush them out, to convert the place into a playpen for the rich, is criminal subservience. The residents of the 9th ward have just won a battle to stop the government from bulldozing their houses without due process. The fact that they had to fight this battle at all, and every other fact about the fate of New Orleans before, during and after Katrina, tells you exactly what the government and its capital affiliates reckon of such small lives.



But, you know, human rights, democracy, legality is all so passé.