That’s one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, now go, cat, go! Don’t you step on my… ah, what’s the use? Can’t do covers… even when I’m panhandling.
Welcome back. I almost said “to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill,” but I caught myself in time. Actually, our august squat house is now, indeed, abandoned… in the sense that there is now no one in it. Yes, friends… our new extra-terrestrial mayor, Gizmandiar, has made good on his threat to evict us – call it a down payment on the opportunistic election campaign he’s planning for this fall. This fucker’s racking up empty promises so fast, you could swear he was born on the planet earth. (In fact, never having seen this creature, I can’t say for certain that he wasn’t.) Everywhere you turn in this town now, it’s Gizmandiar’s doing this, and Gizmandiar’s in favor of that…. and one of those things he’s doing is enforcing building codes and vagrancy laws, no matter how obscure. Hence, our homelessness. (He sent in the goons. And let me tell you, baby… they’re good at what they do.)
Matt, John, Mitch Macaphee, and the others (with the exception of the two Lincolns) think that the lawn-loving space people are just sticklers for the law, and when they took over the town government (by bribing our local officials all the way to Tahiti), they went on a good-government rampage. I personally think that this Gizmandiar character is taking revenge on us for complaining about the carpet-like lawn they established in our courtyard when they first arrived on this sorry planet. What the hell, I even cajoled Trevor James Constable into training his orgone generating device on their space craft. I’m sure even on their anemic planet, turnabout is fair play. (Though if they have negative gravitation, that may not be the case.) Whatever the truth may be, they have found an effective way to squelch criticism of their landscaping fetish…. and we’ve earned our one-way ticket to palookaville. (I coulda been a contender! I coulda been somebody… instead of a bum….)
Now, I don’t know about you, but I think it’s one hell of a coincidence that astronomers have discovered a strangely Earth-like planet a mere 20 light years away at precisely the same time that these odd space aliens showed up in our little town. We asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) 
to calculate the odds of these two events happening at the same time, and the results were astounding – seventy-three trillion to one against. (Of course, those are the same odds Marvin gave me when I asked him if it was going to rain last weekend…. and it rained last weekend. So yes, he could certainly be a meteorologist in this town.) So… is it true? Are the local aliens really from the strange rocky world known as “New Earth?” Can discarded lawn darts really be repurposed as inexpensive bottle openers? Is guar gum a vegetable? Is our children learning?
Yes, friends…. the answers to these and other questions can be found right here next week. And for all those who wrote letters of sympathy and support for your friends in Big Green last week, all I can say is… something went wrong down at the post office, because we didn’t receive any letters of sympathy and support. (I haven’t checked the trash can today, to be fair.) Write us, damnit – we need scrap paper!
World Bank in particular and the “international community” in general have a pretty heinous record with regard to anti-poverty initiatives (if forcing corrupt or corruptible to cut social services can be thought of as “anti-poverty”). So, as Klein points out, that particular pirate ship should go down with Captain Neocon, rather than set him adrift, Bly-style, while they move on to further plunder. What has the international development finance system accomplished other than consigning uncounted millions of people to ever-deepening misery? Think Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, and pretty much anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa – those are the poster children. Argentina was the textbook neoliberal test case up until its total collapse a few years ago, and subsequent change of course. (There’s a success story!) Advocates of the system point with pride at Russia, where millions have lost their pensions and billions of dollars in public assets were ladled out to friends of the late Boris Yeltsin.
What’s their latest target? That country in the horn of Africa that we’ve helped out so much through the years (note: irony) – Somalia, now the subject of a massive U.S. supported occupation by neighboring Ethiopia, 
First there was day of the triffiids. Then there was night of the living dead. Now there’s week of the homeless virtual rock band. And what do they all have in common? Space people. Mother-fucking space people.
I suppose you’re wondering how in the world our elected officials could possibly have been coaxed away from their posts by large amounts of cash… how proffered piles of filthy lucre could convince them to abandon their constituents to other worlders… how the promise of permanent paid vacation could somehow outweigh their dedication to public service. Well, stop it. Of course they took the money and ran – that’s their job. Damnit, if our public officials weren’t corruptible, we would never have been able to remain in our adopted squat house for lo these many years. Our corporate label – Loathsome Prick Records – understood this very well. It’s thanks to them, in part, that we were able to keep Marvin (my personal robot assistant) under our leaky roof. Apparently there’s a local ordinance against harboring mechanical men. (You’d be surprised what kinds of Byzantine laws lurk in the dusty volumes stacked down at your local codes department.) Nothing a little palm grease couldn’t finesse. 
there was a loud knock on the door. It was some of Marvin’s old colleagues from the local constabulary, only they weren’t collecting quarters for the annual charity cotillion. They were putting us out on the street, in effect – a 10-day eviction notice, signed by someone named Gizmadiyar (apparently the acting mayor… and between you and me, I don’t think he’s acting). Even Marvin’s timely intervention seemed to have no effect – the constables seemed quite happy in their work…. almost… TOO… happy….