Grade? Were you the little guy with two shopping bags in front of the security patrol vehicle we saw on security cam? How long before that racked Explorer becomes an Abrams tank chasing shoplifters? (Now we know, tank man just wanted the Red Army to ride him around the lot and look for his car.)

Considering how frustrating I find the Internet here it must be dismal for inquisitive and communicative Chinese after the recent site access crackdown. We have censorship by glut and they by exclusion. Americans please remember that the Chinese economy has been derailed (some ecologists say, "Good!") by the same downturn, or elite adjustment we are experiencing. Notice how reports on Chinese unemployment and displacement have dried up? Their "growth rate", however that is measured is greatly diminished without adequate social service help in an overpopulated land with a despoiled environment. They had been importing lots of food: grains. Who ever mentions that? And yet they have a cadre of billionaires who wheel and deal and speculate right along with our vultures. The Chinese and American models seem to be converging into merchantilist fascism as the governments become synonymous with elite business needs.

What is merchantilist, you ask. You hear American libertarians and fascists using the term as an apology for big business crimes, saying the government is thwarting some myth called the free market. Merchantilism is focused upon the speculation in commodities by an elite or royal class, as in 1600 Spain or 1780s France. The US Revolution was a reaction against British merchantilism in a nascent capitalist world where kings dispensed licenses and charters. Maybe we have to think of international trade agreements and agencies tailor-made for corporate advantage as the mercantile authority (Bourse?)today, as bodies of law compelling big players to do what they wished to do anyway. We are the Whos on a speck of dust, but also the labor engine driving the system. One begins to see clearly why ISPs and search engines like Google and Yahoo would be turning Temple Tiger types in to the government authorities. Anything else would be contrary to the new merchantilism, and they do, after all, want to be considered part of the elite.

Here's a hint: Just think of that giant Wal-mart parking lot as a franchised Tiannemen Square. And when you exit those doors with your melamine fortified dog food or baby formula, your lead-coated utensils, your slave grown produce fertilized by human feces, our little powerless authorities are helpless to stop (for fear of derailing the free market)just be glad you have made it over the border and are back in the good old USA. Hee, I forgot where I parked my freedom!