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at the very least, this is yet another demonstration of the fact that privatization=efficiency is nothing more than a neoliberal pipe dream, particularly when it comes to infrastructure. so there is a clear failure in this: that of the rumsfeld model for the american military, the application of the "logic" of lean production to it. this seems to me more a structural problem playing out than yet another seemingly run-of-the-mill bush administration fuck up: this seems a demonstration that the entire model american conservatives have been advocating does not work at the most basic levels; that is was and is naive, based on a loopy sense of what is "given" at any point--by that i mean if you look at markets or the social contexts within which they function using a time-slice approach--a decontextualized snapshots of the present state-of-affairs--which is the only way i can work out that neoliberalism is able to collapse infrastructure into an a priori and think about it in terms of management of a variant of natural resource rather than as a sector that is only with the greatest of problems integrated into the lunacy of "free markets"---this approach is incoherent conceptually, naive historically, and a fiasco in practice.
personally, i think that the bush people are sawing the branch off upon which they sit at more levels than we think: this seems to go well beyond particular incompetences (in conception, in process, in execution--problems that would seem to provide ample room for whatever seaver ends up bringing into this by way of clarification of his earlier post) and involves the entire retro-model of economic activity and relations to economic activity itself.
all you have to do to see this is position this information against the backdrop not of the iraq debacle (though this is damning enough) but against the litany of parallel failures in the context of structural adjustment programs--eg the failure of suez lyonnaise des eaux to manage chilean water supply (santiago in particular): problems in bolivia involving the same kind of privatization moves, etc.---in this way, you can to some extent bracket the chaos in iraq and see something other in it.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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