The Green Party, especially Fischer, are having a hell-of-a time deciding where they stand, -- for or against the protestors? for or against the new New Security State? for or against global corporations loyal only to markets and hostile
to quasi-socialist states like Germany? for or against the Enronization of Germany?

Most of the Greeners have been highly critical of Bushy Ass-croft post-911 political opportunism, but they're painfully aware that the Hard Right across Europe has also been critical of Bushy Ass-croft as the winged destroyers of local values & local cultures & local economies (what is the root of fascism?); they don't want to seem as if they're teaming up with the likes of Haider, LePen, Schill, and whoever it is who's taken over for Fortuyne. As unemployment and underemployment rise, so will support of the Hard Right.

The Sweat Shop Model of adjunct teaching is just now beginning to hit the German University system. They need someone like Richard Moser (from the Coalition on the Academic Workforce) over here who'll gather the numbers in and let the next generation of academics know what's going on
BEFORE they swing right too.

Of the American system Moser has bravely said: "Administrations have abdandoned the notion that the university should set an example of good citizenship, that they have turned away from the pursuit of justice and instead set up the sweatshops of the future for the greedy to imitate." THAT was clear to me as early as 1995.

Of course, Bush's recent retrograde comments about Cuba & Castro only add fuel to the protest fires, -- as if THAT's exactly the reaction he is hoping for, for if the protests do get out of hand, then the rough & tumble of broken windows, billy clubs, and teargas will conveniently confirm his
arguments for tighter security measures (for less democracy and so forth), and such as that would prove that the anti-globalism protestors, the ones who made their presence painfully felt at Seattle and Genoa, are every bit
as much the ENEMY as OSAMA et al.. Fortunately, the globalism protestors are not getting paid by the CIA, -- whereas Osama? Bush knew. Hitler had also planned a famous convenient fire. (The protests in Genoa, along with the murder of one protestor and the beating of hundreds of others, is
an important forgotten context for September 11.)

Over here, you've got a lot of slithering around, through the Scylla of the globalism protestors & past the Charybdis of the Hard Right, and there's a whole lot of confusion and denial in between where the water is supposed to be golden and not mean, but, in anycase, you've got slithering, tense coils waiting, waiting in the leaves of grass, waiting to strike out at the buzzards perched on the shrubs.