"Lousy town, lousy demonstrations ", Creative Loafing 6-17-04..

[flaminbats]

<snip>
It's also a neighborhood where fear is as palpable as the heat echoing off the cracked asphalt streets. Normally, it's fear of the police. Last week, it was fear of the Army, with its squadrons of Humvees cruising slowly down streets. Big Brother was here, making available 20,000 uniformed soldiers and police to quell any outbreaks of free assembly in this town of 15,000 or in nearby Savannah. The message was clear: We'll crush you if you get out of line.

Dixon tapped his prosthetic left leg as he tried to remember the date the flesh-and-blood limb was lost while he was a soldier -- it was 1977, he finally concluded. Despite the disability, he works hard hauling junk to keep up his just-one-step-from-a-shack home.

And Dixon was not pleased with what the G-8 Summit on Sea Island meant to his livelihood.

"I do most of my work out there," Dixon said of Georgia's tony island enclaves, where he toils as one of the invisible (to the residents) army of little people whose barely compensated work helps keep things spiffy around the mansions. His neighbor, mechanic Kendall River, chimed in: "Yes, he does. He works hard."

Dixon continues: "I've had a week of no work. If you live on St. Simon's (Island), you're rich and that's no big deal. For me, it's a big deal."

That's one lesson about G-8. For the residents of Sea Island and neighboring St. Simon's, ocean-side redoubts where "cottages" sell for $2 million and "homes" garner sky's-the-limit prices, G-8 was an inconvenience. For regular folks, from Dixon to a waitress at the deserted Sandtrap bar on St. Simon's (who admits she took the job hoping to catch the eye of a billionaire), to shop owners all along Georgia's coast who boarded up and grumpily stayed home, the summit was an unmitigated financial calamity.

Not that anyone much cared. Gov. Sonny Perdue's office coyly avoids saying exactly how much the summit cost Georgians. Low guesses are $25 million; more reasonable estimates are $35 million or $40 million, most of it for "security."

In other words, somewhere around four bucks was lifted from the wallet of each man, woman and child in Georgia (a state that has been slashing funds to schools, the disabled, children, health care for the neediest and other frivolities) so that a collection of "leaders" could frolic and overindulge and, oh yes, issue a few policy statements that will accomplish absolutely nothing. After all, they don't really run the New (Corporatized) World Order. They're just frontmen.

The payback? Perdue says Georgia will reap $500 million in increased tourism and economic development due to oodles of publicity about G-8. What a hoot the guv is. He must think he presides over Fantasyland rather than Backwaterland.

Nearly half the 3,000 journalists who signed up stayed home. Many of the rest never left the media center in Savannah -- 60 miles from the summit. The reporters were based at the Westin hotel, which could only be reached by ferryboat, so it was a chore to do reporting. And with all of the free food and booze at the hotel (whatever happened to newsroom ethics policies banning freebies), why bother doing real work? Heck, the Bushies handed out tons of press releases, which is all the scribes needed to pen pabulum such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's adoring lead story last Sunday, "Bush scores G-8 goals." I guess crushing the U.S. Constitution was a G-8 goal.

Reporters who ventured along the Georgia coast and displayed even a smidgen of enterprise were more likely to describe the state as backward and its leaders as rubes, which at least shows there's still some truth in journalism.

I'm here at the demonstration to get my fair share of abuse, and the organizers are so infuriating, I'm about ready to blow a 50-amp fuse.

There are many things you can say about what happened in Brunswick and Savannah. The simplest: It foreshadowed the police state George Bush craves. That isn't news. We've had the open-the-door-to-totalitarianism PATRIOT Act. We've long had "free speech" zones designed to the deny free speech so that all the media and public see is support for the president. We've had a thousand other attacks on our freedom by Bush & Co.<snip>

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