Poems of World
War III
Charles Levenstein
|
Tales of Bolivia
Tales of Bolivia told over dinner
by a horse-faced reporter, tanned
in the Latin American sun, but
the haircut gives away 70's California,
Kennedy School, City of Life and Lights,
a Catholic hero, frocked or not.
Not that the struggle for water
he's broadcast is shabby or cocked-up!
The fine family of finance, corruption
and Bechtel construction, the miracle
of turning water to gold is familiar,
gospel truth. The news is resistance,
powered by poor people, illustrated with
tales of women who knit baby clothes,
school teachers shot on the street,
heroic tenants and tenement owners,
brought to you on the internet,
globalization from the bottom, struggle
recorded in Bolivia that moves
New Zealanders to hose down the embassy:
No more World Bank-SAP's-private capital
stealing irrigation ditches dug by peasants,
signs written in Spanish
so Bolivians can read the headlines.
And the handsome dude is at the center,
recording, taping, writing releases from his
neighborhood, under military dictatorship
for some days, he asks if any of us
Have lived under emergency powers regime
and is chagrined when E. says, Brazil,
about 25 years; and no one says
the president of the U.S.A. was
not elected, since 9/11 we have
been ruled under emergency powers,
a few folks sitting in preventive cells -
All of which leads me to his bewildering
comments on good corporations and bad ones,
international law on human rights
balanced on the scales with everything
since Bretton Woods that keeps the world
safe for money, WTO, etc., etc.
He doesn't know that his talk at
the MIT Faculty Club has been eclipsed
by a criminal government that cares little
about international laws, needs
no treaties to undercut standards,
labor or environmental, he's been too long
in Bolivia to know what's happened
back at home, he's so full of
journalistic success that he does not
know the news. Bechtel already owns
Massachusetts and a Salt Lake City
hustler rules the Commonwealth.
|
|
Charles Levenstein is a
contributing editor for Poems Niederngasse
|
03-04/
|