It seems health care reform will now, in fact, be passed late this weekend. That's historic.

Too bad the cowardly Dems seem ready to use the oily "deem and pass" maneuver.  It's legal. It's constitutional. It's legit. But it's sleazy. And when the Republicans used the same procedure, the Democrats rightly denounced it as such.

All it really amounts to is an obscure and complicated move that allows a House member to vote for something indirectly but still legally voting for it.  This supposedly provides "cover" for pro-life Dems on the right and pro-public option progs on the left to approve a Senate bill they don't really like but see as a necessary evil.

It's also a move that will, in great part, shift the national conversation away from the substance of providing tens of millions with medical coverage to a phony and cynical Republican-driven debate over the legality of the vote. It will also prove that Democrats are every bit as hypocritical as Republicans. It will convince the dumber half of the population that something horrible has just happened. And it will plain confuse almost all of the other half.

All because a few dozen Dems -- right and left-- don't have the courage to put the national interest above their petty personal concerns. And, the tragic part is, it won't even achieve their narrow, selfish ends. It will only diminish a legislative and policy victory they should be proud to be part of.

Marxist McCain

Just a few notes from sunny Phoenix.

Good news for disaffected radical leftists on both coasts. Not only do housing costs continue to be deeply depressed out here in the Valley of the Sun but, as I learned today, Arizona is in the vanguard of the construction of socialism!  Here's your chance to take up residence real cheap where you can catch a daily Red Dawn.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention that within 30 years Europe will be All Muslim because good Christians are aborting each other at such a high pace and that we Americans are not far behind.

That's the skinny I got today from a couple of local Republican Party OFFICIALS who are helping to lead the primary campaign against John "The Head of the Snake" McCain -- folks who are supporting former congressman J.D. Hawyorth in his right wing challenge to Marxist McCain. All this and it isn't even heat stroke season yet.

Heading this evening to a meeting of local Tea Party folks where J.D. will be the guest speaker.  If there are any plans for credibile resistance to the Commie yolk being imposed by the Obama-McCain axis I will send out a coded message. Make the the diodes implanted in your neck on switched to receive mode.

He Was Against It Before He Was For It

First there is a mountain , then there is no mountain, there there is.

Looks like The Dennis Kucinich show is over - at least until 2012 when he runs for president again with no staff, no money and no strategic plan.

Now Kucinich will be voting YES on the health care plan that 2 days ago he was denouncing as one of the greatest sell-outs in modern American history. He clains he just realized that Obama's presidency itself was on the line. Duh.  Maybe's hes been reading my blogs.

So, now, a simple question to those who had been supporting Dennis' naysaying. You only have two options:

Admit that, in your eyes, Dennis has joined the scumbag, Blue Dog insurance lobbyist crew that will set us back 25 years.

Or... you just happened to have the same exact reconsideration he did on the very same day he did and now you are supporting him supporting the bill.

I guess there is a third option: maybe you realize that Kucinich is an ineffective gadfly who once more has made a bit of fool himself. After all, he got NOTHING for his sudden conversion, so what was that tantrum all about?

I'm heading to Arizona tonight where I will spend the week reporting on the McCain-Hayworth primary.  It should be illegal to get paid to cover this sort of thing. Hayworth just got himself into a jam by comparing gay marriage to having sex with a horse. And the moderate in the race, John McCain, is bringing in no one other than Sarah Palin to stump for him.

Seems like the most rational folks in this row are the Tea Partiers -- with whom I'll be spending some time. So far most have them have refused to endorse either guy.

Will post next from Phoenix.

Face it, y'all. California always lead the nation in everything.

We're not only cool. We're also really smart.  We're SO smart that we've now gotten way ahead of the political curve.  A new UCLA study reveals that one out of four fellows Californians have already canned their cruddy health insurance!

We may like to surf and bask in the March sunlight and sip Margaritas in Malibu but we're no fools. We're not gonna buy into that phony Obama health care plan that does nothing but feed greedy private insurers. Fuggeddabboutit, pal.

We stand firmly with Dennis Kucinich and other keyboard progressives and we say NO to private health insurance.

With a little bit of luck, the whole sham bill is going to go down in flames in the dramatic House vote this week and, hopefully, by the end of the year we might even get that uninsured stat up to 35-40% statewide. Eat your heart out, Massachusetts.  Not only do you have to live with those nasty Northeasters and that horrible Big Dig, but you've got a full 97.4% of your population snookered into buying private insurance.  Out here on the Left Coast we are coughing our asses off at you. If things continue like this, we will drive the private insurers into bankruptcy. Such is the power of collective boycotts.

And, by the way, let's make this point very, very clear. What I describe above is, in fact, the only two choices currently in front of us: Either the crappy health care bill will be enacted in the next week or two, or for the foreseeable future we will have absolutely nothing but more uninsured.  Every other scenario is but a fantasy -- and a fantasy spun at the cost of real people's lives.  Do I wish there were better alternatives? Um, yes. Do I think that a more responsive political class might be more independent of the special interests who will profit from this? Yes. Do I think that a greater push from below or more leadership from the top could have potentially produced a better outcome? Most probably.

But none of this is on the table. None of it.

Oh, wait, I forgot one more thing. You may or may not like this other reality or you might not care. But a reality it is. Things have worked out in such a way that the Obama presidency itself is on the line with this vote. If the bill goes down, it effectively turns Obama into a lame duck for the next 3-7 years, Anyone who thinks otherwise should immediately move to Cleveland and volunteer to work the phones for Kucinich's next re-election campaign.

Tomorrow, I have a routine check-up with my cardiologist. Due to all the crappy tests I have to take each time I see him -- blood tests, EKG's, and a tune up on the $40,000 implant in my chest-- the tab runs well over $500.  That little Mercedes-priced implant cost me zero dollars and the procedure itself ran about $300 in co-pays. The private hospital where the procedure was conducted 3 years ago claimed the total tab should have ran about $115,000.  Who knows what kind of deal was cut between them and Blue Cross and who made how much off me.  Meanwhile, my visit tomorrow to the doc will cost me maybe $25.

Do I light candles to my insurance company for this great gift they give me? Hell no. They are bandits and thieves and do everything in their power to deny every claim and to jack up the premium as high as they can go (fortunately I work for the largest private employer in Southern California and we receive platinum-level benefits). In the end, my health insurance costs me something like $150 a month with very low deductibles etc. etc.  As I said,  I hate the bastards. But I am very happy to have the insurance instead of not having it.

If I didn't, I wouldn't be bankrupt. More likely, I would be dead.

With my ability to see the doctor tomorrow and to maintain my health and my treatment through the rip-off insurance I have, I feel it would be IMMORAL for me to argue that others should not have the same access to the same very unfair system.  And so should you.

Apparently "21st Century Socialism" may soon not include 21st century technology. Not to speak of 18th century basic civil liberties.

Some of y'all were ready to defend Hugo Chavez when he shut down opposition TV stations because, after all, they were just right-wing corporate fascist pro-coup mouthpieces.

Now Chavez is toying with a new idea. Clamping down on the Internet.

Said Chavez: "The Internet cannot be something open where anything is said and done. Every country has to apply its own rules and norms."

I still wonder when folks will wake up and understand the very obvious truth that this dude is bent on constructing a dictatorial state.  The statement comes on the heels of an announcement by Chavez's state telcom agency that is setting up a mechanism through which all Web traffic will be centralized.  Quite a people's government -- one which muzzles the people.

I'm going to firmly side with my USC colleague Jonathan Taplin in heartily endorsing the new Matt Damon political thriller, Green Zone. Indeed, I would call it required viewing. (Also a tip to A.O Scott who pretty much also gets Green Zone).

Based loosely on Rajiv Chandrasekaran's excellent Inperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, the fast-paced, gripping flick more closely tracks the grim origins of the war in Iraq and the collective responsibilities of our politicians, military brass and, yes, media elites in embroiling us in a tragic and senseless quagmire.

They're all there in fictionalized and sometimes composite if totally accurate form: The ideological stumble bums from GW Bush to Douglas Feith to the unspeakable Judith Miller, the crook and huckster Ahmed Chalabi, failed pro-Consul Jerry Bremer and the hordes of clueless chino-clad Young Republicans who staffed the Coalition Provisional Authority and scarfed down hamburgers and Domino's pizzas while playing at global politics.

It's a film that actually made me seethe. And also made me remember that we are exactly one week away from starting our eighth year in Iraq -- with no real end in sight to us keepinh 50-60-75,000 troops there for decades to come. Or is there anyone out there naive enough to believe that we will extract our forces from Iraq before we leave Japan, South Korea and...Germany? Welcome to an eternal war.

Taplin and I, however, seem to be in a minority of critics who are generally trashing the film, comparing it unfavorably to The Hurt Locker. I saw Locker and I liked it a lot. It's an excellent film based on a morally weak if not feckless story and which consciously punts on what is arguably the single most tragic political event of the last 35 years. I don't go as far as Bob Scheer did it knocking Hurt Locker, but his central point is a valid one. If nothing else, by omission,  The Hurt Locker endorsed the overwhelming imperial hubris that underlies the war in Iraq by refusing to directly confront it. Bigelow's movie is about the emotional trauma inflicted on one solider.  Director Paul Greengrass' Green Zone, is about the collective psychosis that allows the most powerful country in the world  to delude and lie itself into wreaking havoc on  millions for no good reason.

The rap on Green Zone is that its characters are stereotypes and that, anyway, by now we all know the uncomfortable truths that undergird the war in Iraq.

On the first point, I won't even raise a counter-argument. Suffice it to say that the actual human beings who got us into this war were themselves role-playing. How morally deep and complex, anyway, are zealous ideologues who are ready to send others to kill and die in defense of illusions that exist only in their pointed little heads?

The second point, raised by many critics, that this is all old hat is the real stomach-turner. The last I looked, we still had 100,000 troops in Iraq, car bombs we're still going off, the government was still wobbling and the Iranians mullahs were all having a great laugh about it. All that, and COMPLETE silence on the war on the political front. The only change I'm aware of is that it's the Democrats, not the Republicans, who are now running The Pottery Barn and the enterprise remains morally bankrupt.

Worse, as Taplin points out, there is no apparent cost for all this. The architects of the greatest American foreign policy catastrophe are not only not in jail, they are out playing golf, making the rounds of the Sunday hot gas shows, raking in multi-million dollar book contracts, or, as in the case of Mister Campell Brown, running for elected office.

All old news I guess.

Go see Green Zone.

Valparaiso

A new conservative government came into power this week in Chile.  It will find itself having to be more "socialist" than the former socialist coalition if it wants to keep what appears to be a fragile social order.  Here's my editorial in The Nation on Chile Shaking:

The most treacherous aftershock of Chile's devastating earthquake was the yawning divide between rich and poor--a fissure that has been mostly papered over by several decades of denial and delusion. One needed look no further than the Twitter torrent gushing from the broken country within hours of the temblor. As swarms of desperate Chileans sacked and emptied the shelves of every market and pharmacy in the hardest-hit, isolated southern region, there was a virtual tsunami of tweets, laden with class- and race-charged epithets, demanding that the army shoot to kill all "delinquents," along with a flurry of nostalgic pleas for a return to military dictatorship.

Indeed, with the veneer of social order crumbling almost as fast as the half-million to 1.5 million homes of wood, adobe and other substandard materials, outgoing President Michelle Bachelet ordered tank regiments and thousands of combat troops into the affected areas, producing chilling scenes, reminiscent of the Pinochet era, of nervous conscripts pointing their rifles at the backs of detained "vandals." At one point an eighteen-hour-a-day curfew was clamped down on the battered city of Concepción, as if its population were suspects rather than victims.  More....

Pretty exquisite timing by the Israeli government. They waited for Vice-President Joe Biden to show up in town, book a dinner with Prime Minister Netanyahu and in the best of tradition of BOTH major political parties to vow total, unconditional support for Israel to basically drop trow and shout my departed mom's favorite Yiddish phrase: Kish mir in tuchas! In Italian, roughly, vafanculo. See photo for English translation.

Just as Biden said the White House was pushing for a re-start of the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, the Israeli foreign ministry announces the total deal breaker that it is authorizing the construction of 1600 new settlement units in occupied East Jerusalem.  You know you are dealing with an out of control Israeli government when the ultra-right wing PM Bibi Netanyahu gets outflanked by his own Interior Minister, a religious fundamentalist who authorized the new construction.

Biden, who has never criticized Israel in a meaningful way, was forced to "condemn" the new move-- tough language for an ally.

The New York Times has a pretty conventional round-up of reaction to the Israeli snub.  There's one intriguing nugget in the Times collection: a pointed mini-essay from Palestinian reporter Daoud Kuttab who argues that, as big a slap as this to Obama, he has no one to blame but himself, starting from when he buckled to Netanyahu last fall:

When they met in New York last Sept. 20, President Obama blinked first, leaving the embarrassed Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, hanging on the tree.

In his public statement the U.S. president scaled down from his (and Secretary Clinton’s) previous calls for a settlement “freeze” to accepting Israel’s offer of a settlement “restraint.” Once it became clear that the Americans will not stand up to Israel on settlements, everyone knew their place in this relationship.

Despite the White House’s latest protestation of the embarrassment meted to Vice President Biden, the Obama administration has only itself to blame.

Israel’s announcement March 9 to build another 1,600 units of housing in East Jerusalem, to be added to 112 units approved for a settlement outside Bethlehem a few days earlier, as well other announcements made since that September standoff, all are a result of the American president’s weak knees. The sliding slope that began that day in September has continued and will ultimately derail America’s goals of bringing peace to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Palestinian leadership’s refusal to have direct talks until there is a true freeze on settlements in all areas occupied in 1967 shows that the authors of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 were right by stating in the preamble of that resolution the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.”

All attempts to appease and reward Israel for its acquisition by war has resulted in pushing peace away. If President George W. Bush truly believed, and President Obama truly believes — as they both publicly stated — that an independent, viable and contiguous Palestinian state is in the “national interest” of the United States, Washington must resolve once and for all that any Jewish settlement built on Palestinian territory forcefully taken in 1967 will not be tolerated.

Once America regains its resolve in this area, the peace train can proceed to its destination.

Don't hold your breath for a new departure schedule to be announced. On this issue, the entire U.S. political class is in the tank and that train is far, far off-track.  The big winner in this dust-up by the way isn't Israel. It's Iran.

I just finished watching Dennis Kucinich on MSNBC and I cannot honestly tell you I am stunned or even mildly surprised. I'm more like somewhere between amused and disgusted. He categorically told Lawrence O'Donnell that he will absolutely vote NO on the Senate health care bill that must clear the House if we want as much as rumor of reform.  With that statement, Kucinich joins the ranks of the nabobs ranging from every right-wing Republican to every right-wing obstructionist Democrat like the aptly named Bart Stupak.

Kucinich firmly stated he will  go thumbs down on any bill that does not include a "robust public option."  Nice idea. Too bad the option does not have enough political support to get through Congress. Hell, we don't know yet if there's enough votes to even get the watered-down Senate bill that Dennis opposes through a Democratic House where all you need is a simple majority.

Indeed, the nose counting in these final days before a showdown vote is so razor-close that it just might be Kucinich's naysaying which could block the legislation.

Kucinich's intransigence has prompted some to declare that Kucinich could become "the Ralph Nader of health care."

But such a statement is an insult to Nader.

My readers know that I supported Nader in 2000 (being the premature anti-Liebermanist that I was).  In 2004 I editorialized that he should not run, in part, because he had failed to build on his earlier run. Not to mention that he had gotten in bed with cultists like Leonara Fulani. And I wrote that Nader's 2008 "campaign" was tragi-comic.

But I always defended and would defend his right to run, precisely because presidential politics is NOT a zero-sum game. When you are offered three or four or six choices then you have a real option. Your conscience may lead you to vote for one among many without "taking away" a vote from someone else who you do not or cannot support. It's an open-ended choice.

This is not the case in Congress. Here we have the ultimate zero-sum equation. There are no choices except up or down, yes or no. If you don't vote for a bill, you are voting against it. Period. You are not taking a third position by opposing a less than perfect reform. You are literally joining forces with all of its opponents.

I have always been skeptical of Kucinich not because he is too far left. But because he is too far detached from effective politics. I saw his primary "campaign" up close and personal in Iowa in 2004 -- the ultimate venue for ground-level retail politics-- and he did virtually nothing. Late in the game, he hired a single staffer for the entire state. The point being he squandered the energy and political capital invested in him by naive supporters. I can honestly say he did little, nay, he did nothing to build any movement out of his campaign other than to move his face in front of the cameras of the televised debates.

Here we go again. We now have a black and white choice. Either we pass a flawed health care bill that provides access to private insurance for 30 million Americans without it. Or we do nothing. And in so doing, let the Republicans pick up another 15 or 20 seats beyond the 25 or so they are already destined to win in November.

Dennis Kucinich is no Ralph Nader. He might as well be another John Boehner.

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How Much Longer?

I spoke at quite an offbeat public event last night organized by my colleague and supreme journo K.C. Cole and, inevitably, I ran smack dab into the usual gaggle of full-time hand-wringers, wearing their knuckles thin over all the wonderful, enlightening, irreplaceable marvels we are on the brink of losing as newspapers fold into obscurity.

Do they mean crap like this?  Where column space of one of the supposedly most influential papers in America splays itself wide to carry an endorsement of Liz Cheney's stomach-turning gutter McCarthyism? While it simultaneously pats the Bushie pro-torture lawyers on the back?

Gag me with a spoon, please. This is, of course, all performed in the name of objectivity, fairness, non-partisanship, neutrality, presenting both sides and yada yada yada.

I have a simpler characterization of it: pro-torture propaganda.

Remember this sort of crap the next time someone comes up to you weeping over all that we are losing in the Digital Age.

Could we please lose it just a bit faster?

Here's the fascinating duplicity of modern American journalism. On the one hand, we are told that this is no job for amateurs. That only highly-trained, hard-nosed, highly skilled professionals can dig up facts, assemble them and interpret them. And then we are told, heavens no, it would be unethical for these same geniuses to actually draw any conclusions. In the world of he said/she said everybody's equal. And nobody's ever guilty.

Cancel my subscription to the resurrection.

Sit Down At Cat State Northridge -- 7 Arrests

We have the most comprehensive, even exhaustive coverage of the March 4 protests against cuts in California public education at Neon Tommy.

Here's just a few of our higlights:

A running blog with dispatches, photos and slideshows.

Hundreds of photos from our live Flickrfeed.

A compilation of protest videos.

A slideshow and a report from protests at UCLA.

A slideshow from the protest in Pershing Square -- Los Angeles

A report from Cal State Northridge.

A slideshow of the large protest at UC Irvine.

An audioslideshow from UC Riverside.

A report with video from UC Santa Cruz.

A round-up of protests across the country.

An analysis of challenges facing the student movement.

And much much much more still coming in through the night.

It's nice to see some 0ne other than the tea baggers start coming out into the streets to protest the economic situation. A surging movement of tens of thousands of students, teachers and public education staff -- centered in California but spreading now into more than 30 states--will be out in tomorrow defending that nice, old idea notion of decent public education. You know, the kind of schools we are spending a trillion dollars to supposedly build in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At our USC-based Neon Tommy publication we will be field a dozen or so reporters and photographers throughout the day and aggregating reports from across the state and country. Make sure to follow us.

Here's some maps we have posted on events around SoCal and across the country.

Here's our round-up of students gearing up for the protests including a live Twitter feed from the activists.

And as we used to say in the Old Days, this could also be A Field Day For The Heat.

Stay with us through the day and night tomorrow. And follow the Neon Tommy twitter feed as well.

Here's the excellent text version from reporter Gigi Graciette.

There were still scattered reports of looting Tuesday evening in Chile and social tension remains inflamed and volatile as mounting criticism of relief efforts focus on its tardiness.  Thousands more troops were deployed throughout the country today to begin distributing basic food items. But tens of thousands remain without shelter, foodstuffs and medicines.  And 18 hour a day curfew had been clamped down on the city of Concepcion, the hardest hit by the quake and home to 600.000.

Most reliable reports estimate that with the death toll hovering for the moment at around 800, somewhere around 1000 people are still missing.

Foreign aid began trickling in today, in part because of an unwisely prideful decision by the Chilean government to not make an urgent relief plea. Only reluctantly and slowly did the government of President Bachelet make such a call.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made an extremely brief foray into Chile today. And in a surreal scene, personally delivered the first batch of American aid in the form of 25 satellite cell phones. Thirty-five more have been promised along with other quite modest relief supplies.

Can someone please explain this from either end of the equation?

Here's the rest of a stunning Times photo montage.

Here's one eerie similarity between the disasters in New Orleans and Chile.  Just as more people died in Katrina not from the hurricane but from the broken levees, it may turn out that as many or more Chileans died from an under-reported tsunami than they did from direct damage from the quake.

And the Chilean Navy may bear some responsibilities in this by not having adequately warned those living along a 100 mile stretch of national coastline that a huge wave was headed their way.

John Dinges, former NPR news manager and someone who has followed and reported the Chile story for the last 4 decades has the details here.

Meanwhile, nearly 72 hours after the quake the social crisis in Chile seems to be mounting instead of abating. Basic services are being restored but there's no clear answer how to offer relief for the approximately 2 million people who have been affected.

Sporadic looting by the poorer half of Chile has flashed in several cities and the vivid class hatreds that have fueled Chilean politics for so many decades are starting to resurface.

I've been increasingly alarmed by the vitriolic name calling on Twitter where too many Chileans have been too quick to write off all those involved in the sacking of goods as "delinquents...criminals...animals..scumbags" and worse. Calls are being made for the Army to shoot them down like rabbits. Others have called for a military coup.

It's all so damn predictable.  On that subject, here's a relevant post from News Junkie which argues that in times of catastrophe survival always trumps social order.  That's without repeating one more time that much of what passes for daily social order is, in any case, nothing but legalized looting

Six cops for six diapers. Quite logical.

The above is a well-translated clip of a Chilean television report from earlier on Sunday. It's shot in the quake-stricken city of Concepcion as a local supermarket was being looted.  I saw the rest of the report on a live stream, which does not appear here and there is a lot missing. In that part that is missing the reporter says over and over again "this is a very complex situation."

Indeed.

So let's get a few untidy but contextual facts out of the way right off the bat. While this sort of pillage has led to a declaration of virtual martial law in several Chilean cities, the handing over of police powers to the Army and the first impositions of nightly curfews since the Pinochet period, we are also reading one Tweet after another of how "legal" businessmen are gouging quake-stricken Chileans by jacking up prices on milk, bread, gasoline and pay-by-the minute cell phones. That is looting of the worst kind.

But back to the supermarket stuff.  I don't think anyone wants to advocate anarchy and mob-rule especially in times of catastrophe.

A couple of these looted markets, however, were closed. Their owners clearly found it too risky to put up basic foodstuffs and  medicines for sale in an orderly way without it, in fact, turning into a mob scene. So thousands of desperate people whose houses collapsed, who had their water and cooking gas supply cut off and who were poor to begin with, broke into the markets and grabbed what they could.  Is this great social policy? No. It is, nevertheless, quite predictable and would happen anywhere.

The security forces have an obligation to intervene and impose some modicum order. The footage of people being tear-gassed and hosed down with armored water cannons as their city lay in rubble around them, is a stomach-turning vision.  Put a few cops in front of the store and fire a few shots in the air. Maybe.

I say maybe because what the Chilean government should have done was to send in those troops IMMEDIATELY after the quake, confiscate the supermarkets, hand out the supplies in a rational fashion and later compensate the owners (maybe).

By doing nothing, by not even forcing the stores to open for business, the resulting chaos was more or less guaranteed.  Indeed, starting tomorrow -- a day too late-- the government will be giving families free relief packages in some sort of deal worked out with market owners.

A lot was also made about how, gasp, the looters were also taking TV's and other consumer goods. Well, of course!  Again, this is not recommended social policy but it is inevitable that it takes places once those stores were broken into and after the government failed to make sure that they were both open and protected and that some system of material relief was in place. It has and would happen anywhere. We live in a system based on and motivated by personal greed. Some folks rob you with a fountain pen (or a Wall Street hedge fund, others do it more opportunistically with a crowbar. Sometimes it's legal and sometimes it isn't).

That said, looting per se cannot be tolerated. But to impose curfews and militarize the most hard-hit cities is not a pretty picture and is a make-shift, repressive response that could have been pre-empted. Further, a mother and/or father have a moral obligation to secure the basic needs for their offspring in times of emergency whether or not the owners of a food store feel or don't feel like opening for business.

------

A few words now about Chile versus Haiti. Much has been written about how Chile suffered so fewer casualties because it supposedly has such a superior building code and is so experienced in anti-earthquake construction.  Only partially true. ANY PLACE in the world has better building codes than Haiti -- which is marginal to the Fourth World. Further, the Haitian quake was centered much, much closer to a much larger metropolitan center. The epicenter of the Chilean quake was 22 miles below the surface. In Haiti it was only eight miles below ground.

I have lived in Chile and while, no doubt, modern, high-end residences are built with earthquakes in mind, millions of working class residences are little but wooden shacks or cracker box apartments. Please note that, in fact, the common term for a Chilean shanty town home is "media agua" -- which means half-water because they are so open to the environment and so full of holes. If this quake had been centered in Santiago, or worse, in the picturesque but rickety-built port of Valparaiso, I shudder to think what the body count would have been. Tens of thousands for sure.

Further, the single biggest building to collapse in this quake is a BRAND NEW 15 story apartment complex in Concepcion which fell over on its side and in which several dozen people were still trapped as of Sunday night.  What was that about superior seismic construction (see photo)?

Also, take a look at the video below. It was shot in the working class suburb of Maipu on the outskirts of Santiago, hundreds of miles from the epicenter. These sort of ticky-tacky housing developments are as common in Chile as rashes on a baby's bottom. Hundreds of thousands of Chileans live in these sort of structures in a working class belt that surrounds and penetrates the capital city.  Again, imagine if the epicenter had been near Santiago,

I point this out not to trash Chile. On the contrary. I am deeply moved and upset by what has happened there not to mention that I have dozens of cousins and a mother-in-law living there. But beginning with Pinochet and his ultra-nationalist clap-trap, Chile has suffered from a pronounced case of triumphalist self-delusion.  The succeeding twenty years of civilian rule have done little to abate that malady.

Official Chilean dogma is that it has left the Third World behind and is now in a small circle of prosperous, economically developed and advanced countries. This is poppycock. Millions of Chileans have been lifted out of abject poverty in the past two decades but they remain poor. Or, at best, about a half-inch above water.

Wages are miserably low. Labor law is untouched from the days of the dictatorship. The educational system is broken and terribly class-biased. The economic elites live in luxury unthinkable to the other 14 or 15 million of their countrymen. A sick consumerism --beyond the country's real means-- has further distorted the economy. Common items such as tennis shoes are sold on 12 month installment plans with an effective 30% interest rate.  And while Chile is, in many ways, much better off than its closest neighbors, its economy is NOT developed. Chile prospers primarily by selling off and exporting its NON-RENEWABLE natural resources ranging from copper to irreplaceable hardwood forests to a depleted stock of salmon (plus some replaceable fruit harvested at shameful wages).

All this might explain why the government has awkwardly danced around the issue of almost out of hand rejecting foreign assistance to deal with the earthquake. It's a laughable notion that it doesn't need outside support. Several million Chileans, some in my own extended family, could have used some of that help BEFORE the quake. Indeed, every month my wife and I must decide who, among the relatives, will get wired some money to pay for this month's prescription drugs, tuition payment or whatever.

A natural disaster like this one, as painful as it might be, always offers the opportunity of reordering priorities and doing some hard re-thinking about where a society is at. Doesn't always happen. Just ask the folks in the lower 9th Ward of Nawlins.

Anyway, here's that video of the housing complex in the suburbs of Santiago. You can drawn your own conclusions. There is no audio.