Think of the annual US war budget? Now think of what just a small percentage of that could really buy? Poverty.com shows just what is possible for $200 billion per year at their site, using the calculations agreed to by the United Nations and multiple countries, including the US, that attended a summit in Monterrey, Mexico in 2002.
The bankruptcy of US foreign politcy in Latin America will become highlighted later this week when Bush deploy’s himself into Latin America with a Navy ‘floating hospital’ in tow. What the world will see is Top Gun military doctor Dubya diplomat in action, and it is assured ahead of time, to underwhelm rather than ‘shock and awe’.
The gigantic US navy war vessel accompanying the donkey is to perform surgeries at high cost to the US taxpayer, and minimal real long term medical value (if any) to the chronically malnourished and ill of Latin America.
Meanwhile, Cuban doctors quietly and with little fanfare continue to run medical clinics in country after country when allowed to do so, and Hugo Chavez continues to offer low cost fuel supplies to the not so well off, in addition. The main tool the dumbest ass neo-con gringo rulers have to provide in response, is an creased militarization everywhere in the region using the drug war as excuse. Cops, soldiers, prisons, death squads, and neo-liberal imperialist inforced privatization is DC’s way to winning ‘hearts and minds’! What a formula for success!
Eventually Washington’s war on many fronts will turn into defeat on many fronts. Nowhere is that day nearing faster than in Latin America. Imagine the ridicule that this Pentagon ‘floating hospital’ will arouse. The US is widely known as providing inadequate medical care to its own population(to children in Texas, for just one example), let alone to other nations. While the Pentagon is most noted for its constant ‘collateral damage’ to innocents, not being any angel of mercy.
Latin America will watch as Bush hobnobs with ruling elites that the mass of people despise rather than considering them as potential saviours from their economic insecurity. People need help, and America offers up a clown and a media circus. What a contrast to the Cuban doctors doing real work. US elite intellectual bankruptcy at its finest.
Well looky who’s used the protect the border bait and switch before! Ninety years ago, same illegal immigration scare, same perp.
I happened across some posters used to recruit soldiers during WWI. Here they raise the Mexico bugaboo to ease worries that enlistment into the military would automatically mean duty in the trenches. “No More Men Are Needed” at the western front. Oh really?! It reminds me of something Air Force recruiters were telling Colorado College students on Thanksgiving 2005. US troops would be out of Iraq by Christmas. Potential enlistees need not fear being sent to Iraq because America was already pulling out. Public opinion had already forced their hand, they said, and we were pulling out.
One of the most unreported aspect of US immigration policy is how it breaks up immigrant families, oftentimes under the guise of saving children from abuse. The recent case of a undocumented mother in Pueblo accused of ‘selling’ her baby is case in point.
This young woman came to the US trying to find money to feed her 2 children left behind in Mexico with her grandmother. Instead, she ends up arrested on felony charges and her third child is taken away from her and put into Child Protective Service’s control. There it may well end up being put up for permanent adoption while the mother may end up behind bars for years unable to help provide for the other 2 children in Mexico!
In addition, a couple who tried to assist her, themselves were arrested and put into jail under felony charges! This couple has 4 kids that are also possibly up for grabs by the police, if there would be no other relatives to help to care for them.
What a total mess the police have made out of this situation. It’s not like any US government agency cares one wit about the children Involved. For all the US authorities care, this mother’s 2 children in Mexico could be allowed to starve to death. All the time mothers giving up their children to adoption in the US are offered financial incentives to do so. They are not charged with ‘selling’ their babies. But when an ‘illegal alien’ mother tries the best she can to work things out while being considered an animal that needs to be hunted down and deported, suddenly the terms of US law are altered. She is accused of traffic in babies, her own no less! If she had just handed it over to an adoption agency forever and away from her ever seeing the baby again, all would have been sweet and legal! Instead, she wanted to hold on the best she could to that baby.
The Pueblo police need to get their butts out of the baby theft business, and free this mother and the couple that she was living with that befriended her. What a travesty the US law is when it steals babies from their mothers, while accusing the mothers of ‘selling’ their own flesh and blood. Immigrants are human beings, and the US law degrades them instead of helping them. It is disgusting how the victims are blamed of crimes, while the government authorities are always hailed as being the decent folk involved. They most certainly are not. They are the real traffickers in human flesh.
One might want to think that this case is an exceptional mess up, and that it is not typical of how the US law is applied against the interests of undocumented parents and their children. However that is not the case, and this abuse of police power happens all the time, yet most cases never make it into the news. Immigrant children are constantly taken away form their parents while the parents are jailed and ultimately deported, leaving their children in protective custody within the US and placed into foster families.
While the NFL was promoting male chocolate wrestling during its halftime, Mexico’s PRI (Partido Revolutionario Institucional) decided to try to make its image gayer, Moo.
The PRI is the party of long time Mexican dictatorship, and suffers from shall we say?… a poor marketing image? So how to deal with that and contrast themselves as hot compared to their stodgy Catholic companions, the PAN? They decided in Coahuila to allow gay marriages!
That’s like if Idaho or Arizona’s state governments were to do such a thing here in the US. Plus, it helps the tourist trade in economically depressed Saltillo, the state capital. Look out Las Vegas! It will become a gay Mecca.
Saltillo is the new sin city of North America! Andale! But who the hell is ever going to see the PRI as the party of Mexican liberalism?
Americans are under the impression that Mexico is an extremely poor country. It is not. It is the world’s 5th largest oil producer, and the US economy’s 2nd largest foreign supplier of oil. Canada is #1, while Saudi Arabia comes in at #3. It’s per capita income is significantly higher than that of Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Turkey, and Argentina. China is considered an economic super power, yet Mexico has 4 times the per capita income of that country. Mexico even has the world’s 2nd largest oil field. There is only one problem though. Mexico’s oil reserves are running out.
Yes, it is predicted that Mexico may only have about 10 more years before its 2 major oil fields go dry. What then? It is a country of over 100,000,000 people, and its government gets over half of what it spends from its oil revenues. As a result, the national oil company, PEMEX, is billions upon billions in dept, even as it funds the nation. Mexico wants to join up with US prosperity, even as the US itself is running into problems finding new sources of cheap oil to float its own economy. And Mexico is in much worse shape in that regard.
In this desperate world of energy depletion we are now entering into, it’s all for one’s self, so up goes The Wall. A decade ago, the promises were made that all would enter into a new world of prosperity through NAFTA. Free flow of everything! But how quickly dreams built on mirages can fall. We are now in a war to steal the energy resources away from the people of Iraq and Iran, and there is not about to be any US elite misgivings, if they have to screw over the Mexicans in a few short years ahead. A brave new world awaits us.
A small note… wikipedia states that with current rates of consumption, the world’s oil reserves will run out in 32 years. Be sure to check your tire pressures .
Also of interest… Mexicans stage tortilla protest
There used to be a lot of worry about the government issuing a national identification card to all of us and then requiring us to carry it all the time so that they could monitor us, The People, all the time. Well now that they are actually slipping that noose half around our neck, the population of the US is without a bleep of protest against it. Maybe it is because the name of the national ID card sounds so familiar and appears as nothing much new? The national ID card is called a passport, and it will soon be required for all travel outside the US, even to Mexico and Canada.
What? Don’t think of the passport as a national ID card? Well that’s what it is becoming in graduated steps. When you apply for one, you are registering with the federal government. They already have a list of grading people on supposed ‘flight risk’, and it will be an easy task to meld this to the passport. And what’s to stop an ‘overland travel risk’ list from being added on now? After all, one can hijack a bus and do some major damage with it if one wants. All America must be protected from that, they will say.
These new passport requirements were slipped in by the Bush Administration without even the most minimal discussion and with zero protest within the House and Senate. Millions of people (Canadians, Americans, and Mexicans) who never had passports are now being herded into having to obtain one. Our whole county is being turned into a gated community, all under the excuse of bettering our own security. In fact, much of the North American continent is being turned into a high security zone, where people will travel between countries while under a secret surveillance pegged to their passports.
This secret surveillance does not now, and certainly will not in the future, have any due process as to who gets to go, and who is made to stop at the series of gates that will be put into effect. That will be a military decision, since the Department of Homeland Security and MIGRA really are part of the military model, not civilian one. If this reminds you of Palestinians within the areas controlled by Israel, then you get the picture of the model being used by this passport system of surveillance. It is all quite arbitrary and beyond the reach of legal rules and observations.
We are only now in the first steps of this new, comprehensive surveillance system being put into place. but the fact that we don’t even recognize much what is really being done is not promising for stopping and reversing course. All the blame for ‘inconveniences’ will be placed on Osama bin Laden, and not our own misleaders. We will be told that it is wartime and that our liberties must be compromised. We will be told that there are certain elements of our society that are high risk to the rest of us. Wait! Did I say we WILL be told that? We are already being told all this, and most of us nod our heads in acquiesence.
An Iron Curtain is Descending is a good article at the counterpunch site about the already occurring effects of this new surveillance system upon people. Check it out!
I have one of those big map atlases that Rand McNally puts out each year, and have begun to use it some to home school my kid in geography. Since the District 11 school she attends is so busy constantly testing kids about the 3 Rs, they don’t seem to have time to teach geography, history, science, nor much really about anything. As it is, if I don’t teach her where Kansas is, she’ll probably be graduating down the road, with the herd of American kids that will be unable to locate their asses from a hole in the ground.
What gets me about Rand McNally is the, shall we say, subtle racism they practice. Where the fuck is Mexico, you idiots? It’s not like Mexicans and Americans don’t drive in each other’s countries. So what happened here? Let’s see? there are detailed maps of Canada’s provinces on 12 pages, plus semi-detailed maps of most of the big cities of that country. But Tijuana? Where is it? Where are the major Mexican cities, the Mexican states? Why might they not be shown? Instead, there is one page with a poorly detailed map of the country of Mexico as a whole. The idea here is a racist one. It is that Mexico is unimportant, and just does not rate being mapped by such a prestigious outfit as Rand McNally. Oh brother. And what idiots!
I wouldn’t mention this map thing, except that it seems so prototypical of the American racist mindset of the world. Dear Mr. McNally Inc., how many Mexicans do you think are in the US as compared to Canadians? When they drive back and forth from the US to Mexico, and Mexico to the US, don’t you think it would be nice of your ‘service’ to provide folks with directions? After all, that is the service your business supposedly is engaged in. Canada gets mapped, so why not Mexico?
Why not provide Texans, for example, with detailed maps of the North of Mexico? It would be nice to have city maps of Monterrey/ Saltillo, Guadalajara, and the DF. And certainly if Newfoundland can get its own detailed provincial mapping, then why not Nuevo Leon, Baja California, Chihuahua, etc.? And why not, other than the racism involved?
This is not just an unthought about error neither. The passage between Tijuana and San Diego is perhaps the busiest international crossing in the world. So why leave a blank space on that map for where Tijuana should be? Duh… Rand McNally is clearly a business that is ready to shoot itself in the foot by totally ignoring Hispanic buyers of their product. Racism seems to be more important to keep intact, than sales of their product or integrity of the service they provide. There are far more people traveling between Mexico and The US, than between the US and Canada, yet Canada gets mapped in detail, while Mexico gets only the barest of outlines of a national map.
The lesson here for my kid, is that neither her Colorado public school nor our big American Rand Mcnally book of maps will educate her well about geography, nor about other cultures. That, she will have to pick up on her own with my help, or she won’t learn much about these things at all. Why? It is simply that we live in a culture that prizes ignorance and stupidity much more than education. America the Free has become America We don’t know Our Asses from a Hole in the Ground. Keep fighting the rot. That’s all we can do.
The people of Oaxaca have begun to rebound from the wave of repression that Vicente Fox unleashed on them in his final days of office. Many were rounded up and sent off to far away prisons in other Mexican states to be tortured, beaten, and sexually assaulted, and the population as a whole cowered in fear of the same being dished out to them.
Meanwhile, Felipe Calderon began a media campaign to improve his already horrible presidential image. He mobilized the military to scurry around and pretend that it was waging in a gigantic campaign against Narco-lawlessness. Few have been impressed, though. He announced that he was beginning a jobs program. Few have been impressed though. He announced that he would try to stop the rise in price of Mexico’s staple, the corn tortilla. Few have been impressed though.
Meanwhile, the family of Brad Will have begun a campaign against Mexican government impunity and demanded that justice be done for Brad Will, who was the Indymedia American reporter shot down in cold blood during a protest in Oaxaca late last October. Justice for Brad Will!
Meanwhile, the family of the political prisoners held and abused by the Mexican police and army, began to protest on behalf of their family members. This was being met by repression itself, outside the jails.
Finally, after the weeks of repression, last weekend the people of Oaxaca once again demonstrated their opposition to the political repression that the government of Fecal (Felipe Calderon) was directing against their state. Ten thousand fearful marchers turned out into the streets once again. The crowd was overwhelming from the poorer strata of society, and one cannot see even a single kid in the crowd. It would have been too risky to bring them to the protest, with such a high level of repression coming from state authorities. .
Check out the film of this march. To finally win a struggle, one must not give up, and must protest, protest, protest. Certainly a lesson that we in the United States need to learn well. Victory never comes easily. Here is the Oaxaca march on video.
Where is the John Birch Society when we really need them? For decades they posted big bill boards around the US warning us of the dangers of the UN and ‘one world government’. We have it now for sure, as the US invades and bombs country after country and all pretense of international law has been thrown in the garbage can. The US runs the United Nations which stamps every illegal Bush activity with its followup stamp of supposed legitimization. Except the moral authority of the UN is about at the same level as the honesty of the Bush Adminstration. Low. Very low.
Almost nowhere in the world do any people really see any legitimacy in their rulers. Everywhere it is pretty much the same, with an exception or two to prove the point. Why such lack of faith in the rulers? it’s pretty much because all of them go along with the group of thugs misleading The American Empire. International hate for our own native US ruling thugs rubs off into becoming a growing hate and disrespect for all the local country klans that follow along behind this constant US government terrorism. How much longer will the world just go along silently with all this? They’re going to begin to tear their own local ruling classes of whores to shreds pretty damn soon because this hate can’t just continue to build without any release.
And what is it about our leaders’ addictions to kicking the poor of the Third World in the teeth again and again? They tromp around and pat themselves over and over on the back, but in essence they are the most despicable bullies. The type of bullies whose grandparents murdered off the natives, and held Blacks as property which they treated worse than today we treat our dogs and cats. And everybody knows, too, that America’s ruling class still treats its dogs and cats better than they treat the children of the world. No Humane Society for those kids murdered while I write this commentary, in the very same hours that the US military now rains down its weaponry on its newest found victim, Somalia.
The liberal community here seems numb by this new assault. But it’s time for some indignation instead of prayer. Stop this new miserable escalation of fighting that Bush and The Invertebrate Party are bilaterally engaging in. Always begging, lobbying, and voting for the Invertebrate Party politicians turns the voter him/herself into a spineless jellyfish, too. Get out and demonstrate YOU spineless lazy wimps! I’m talking about the American liberals now. You Tory Republican turds aren’t spineless. Just dumber than shit, that’s all. Not even shit for brains most of you DittoDips. But what’s the excuse for the inability to get indignant and move… for the spineless, lazy Ass kissing liberal?
The Pikes Peak Peace and Justice Commission (PPJPC) condemns the US Immigration & Naturalization Service (ICE-INS) for its Dec. 12 raids at multiple US facilities of the Swift & Co. that racially targetted Hispanic workers for arrest at their place of work. Over 1250 Hispanic workers were rounded up as if they were cattle and not human beings with rights and feelings. Families have been torn asunder, US-born children are being forced to leave for countries they have never known, and an atmosphere of racial intolerance and hatred is being promoted within our communities. This is not the proper role for our government and governmental agencies to be playing.
This raid comes in the context of a president whose foreign and domestic policies are increasing coming under fire for illegally promoting warfare, torture, and military occupations of other countries. It comes also in the context of an increasingly hostile use of laws against other minority groups within the US, such as Arabs and Muslims of varying nationalities, that also has undermined the basis of having a national culture respectful of all of our residents, whether citizens or not.
We at the Colorado Springs PPJPC, are unalterably opposed to reducing certain cultural groups within the US to second class residents subject to abusive, selective, and descriminatory application of US laws. We object to citizens being denounced in block, by federal agencies who allege before trials or convictions, that residents of one ethnic background are guilty as a group of criminal activity, such as “ID theft.” We object to the policy of holding immigrants looking for work in our country subject to criminal prosecution for trying to support their families as best as they can. Most come from countries where the US government has for decades intervened in a hostile and destructive manner. In short, we object and condemn the US government for further persecuting poverty stricken workers looking for a better life in what is a nation of previous immigrants. We condemn the Swift & Co INS raids.
May it also be pointed out, that in the case of Hispanic workers, the overwhelming majority of them are of indigenous Native American background, no matter that they currently speak Spanish as first tongue. To those Anglo-american citizens who shout at these foreign workers that they are breaking the law, and that they should be thrown in jail and never set foot again on Anglo terrain, the PPJPC hopes that they can examine their consciences, examine their souls, and open their hearts to having a more charitable attitude towards others.
Those immigrants with Native American blood were here first before Anglo ancestors chose it upon themselves to ‘illegally’ immigrate to the US shores, often murdering Native Americans and stealing their land and properties. Much of the US territory where Hispanics are now being racially profiled, was land peviously stolen from Mexico by war. It is utter hypocrisy for one racial and language group to call the US borders ‘their’ territory, and theirs alone.
Further, the PPJPC rejects the increased militarization of the US Southern Border, most underlined by the efforts to build a giant impenetrable wall there. This construction runs counter to the desires of the people most effected, citizens of both nations living on both sides of this border. Further, we reject the US govenment support for abusive regimes throughout Latin America. We reject the US war against the people of Colombia, and we reject the US’s imposition of repressive governments across Central America. All these actions create conditions of misery, and a need for people to flee their native lands.
Most of all, we reject the US governmental support to the repressive Mexican government, military, and police. Mexico is the country from which most of the undocumented workers were fleeing when they were caught up in the Greeley Colorado raids of the Swift & Co meat processing facilities. The PPJPC calls on our American government to dismantle US military schools of torture that train members of the repressive Mexican military, stop supporting Mexican government repression in Oaxaca and esewhere in that country, and demand that the Mexican and US governments seek justice for those murdered, tortured, and disappeared in Oaxaca, and elsewhere within Mexico.
The PPJPC, too, is concerned about National Security. But attacking immigrants and foreign nationals on US terrirtory is not the way to make our country more secure.
Mexico is falling apart worse than I remember. I used to haunt downtown El Paso/slash/Juarez. The two cities are really one, but Juarez is about 6 times bigger and the poor side of town, and there are armed guards keeping the poor from the rich side of town.
The colonias described, they are on this side of the border as well. And just as illegal.
In 1991 there was a story on one of the El Paso stations, on the video news, a guy emptied one of those honey wagons, the Port-o-potty emptying trucks, into the canal on the mexican side. There are two main canals, the Franklin canal as it is called in El Paso and downstream, and the (don’t dear God hold me to this name) La Victoria canal on the Mexican side. Mind you, this kind of literally “shit” goes on everyday. Only this particular day there was a Mexican news crew hiding in the bushes.
They filmed him for forty-five minutes nonchalantly emptying the crap into the PEOPLES DAMN DRINKING WATER. Then the cops moved in and arrested him AFTER aaaaarrrrrrrrggggggggg. Then they shot some scenes where women and children were getting their water downstream from the incident. To show us how noble the government was in protecting them I suppose. Of course, it might have been a little bit nobler if they had gone up to the people and at least warned them that they were drinking feces. Guess they just figured they would watch it on the TeeVee news in their cardboard shacks which have no TeeVee, which is kinda good because they don’t have any electricity to run a TeeVee anyway.
But in downtown El Paso, you can go to Alameda street and actually just look across the creek, in its concrete-lined bed, looks like a drainage ditch actually, with the concertina-wire topped 12 foot cyclone fence, and see the maquila sweatshops. There are supposedly designed to be modern and convenient and comfortable and all, but the strangest thing about them is that there, a mere hundred yards from the line where things like OSHA and the EPA are such bad wicked naughty whiners that they actually insist on workplace safety(sometimes) and environmental protection (sometimes) as I said dear friends a hundred yards away… in these wonderful modern factories and warehouses, the other side of PRI, used to be the dominant party there, the Unions, are forbidden to organize, and since every worker in Mexico pre-nafta was a card carrying member of the labor unions, the people working there are ordered to disavow their union membership.
You know, I would almost bet that some of those workers were in the video of the women and children drinking shit out of an irrigation canal.
Oddly enough, there was a cholera epidemic that year. as in most years. The epidemic was spread to this side of the border as well. In colonias on the Franklin canal.
If it is not enough to give Israel the free reign and financial aid to terrorize Palestianians and steal their lands at will, the US and Britain also try to disrupt and tear up the governance the Palestinians try to arrange for themselves.
For years they made demons out of Arafat and Fatah, but today the US & its allies are politically supporting Fatah by trying to force new Palestinian elections early and pumping money into Fatah and its leader Abbas, so that this group will be able to buy the new elections at will and destroy their opposition, Hamas. The US and Britain are profoundly undemocratic forces in the world today, though this in effect is nothing new, and this is just the most recent example of this. Our corporate government leaders no more support democracy in placxes like Palestine and Iraq, than they do in our own workplaces if we try to organize unions.
We can go back to the US’s coup against Allende where Washington DC installed Pinochet into power. We can go also to examine Algeria, where in 1991 the US and Europe supported a military coup after the elections were won by an Islamic coalition. Subsequently, several hundred thousand were slaughtered down, and repression there continues to this day. Hardly an incentive for Muslim groups looking for national independence and liberation to take a peaceful course of action, as opposed to crashing planes into the Pentagon and elsewhere.
We can also see today, the US and its allies pushing to keep an undemocratic and unpopular Lebanese government in power. One that opened the gates to a foreign power (Israel) to wage war once again inside Lebanon against the majority sector of that country’s population. We can see it in the US and European’s support for the fraudulent and unpopular president just installed in Mexico, that provoked the largest demonstrations in the history of that country. And we can see it in the longterm US and Brit support for the Saudi Arabian monarchy, the Musharraf dictatorship in Pakistan, and the repressive Egyptian government, that has merely the sheerest of mirages of having any democratic trappings to it.
Everywhere we look, the US and its allies are supporting tyrants and thugs, but can anybody really claim that this is something new? But this latest example of the US and Britain trying to force new elections on the Palestinians, is a new low of sorts, I think. It is forcing upon the Palestinians the type of factional violence that the US and Britain have already forced upon Afghanistan and Iraq. Could the Nazis themselves have taken this strategy of fomenting inter factional fighting to a form more detrimental to its victims?
I have spend a lot of time in Tamaulipas, Mexico. And I once lived in Laredo across the river from this story, too. If you have never imagined such a place, Laredo is America’s largest inland port. That would make where this story occurred, Nuevo Laredo, Mexico’s largest inland port. Just one shallow river that flows from Colorado’s mountains, divides the 2 cities. Subcomandante Marcos (now going by the name, Delegate Zero) of the Zapatistas visited there last month. Here is what he saw, amidst the garbage of Tamaulipas.
I have to tell people about any real info written about Tamaulipas. It is really about America, too. Ask my daughter. She has spent much of her young life there.
Now, let me mention that I am offering our idiot Colorado Representative, Tomas Tancredo, free transportation with my family to visit in Tamaulipas. He can go fishing down there with the family, and doesn’t have to walk the same barrios that Marcos just did. Wouldn’t want the poor guy to get hurt. That is when he gets back from his ‘Third World’ Miami vacation that he passed at a swank hotel..
What a dummy this twerp is. He heads the House Immigragion Reform Caucus, and he is just about as knowlegable on immigration matters, as Silvestre Reyes is about Shia and Sunni divisions. In other words, he is a totally ignorant dumbass. If he thinks that Miami is ‘the Third World’?, duh, then come along, Fool, and let me show you.
Tom Tancredo was in the news last week embarrassing even the Bush Klan by his uniformed and stupid remarks that Miami was just like the Third World. Duh? Then why is much of Latin America trying to get there then? Not too many are trying to get to South Texas, though.
Maybe we can get this dummy a job at the Swift and Co meatpacking plant in Greeley? If he’s smart enough to even do the work right on the kill floor there even? I have my doubts. He’s only smart enough to be the Big Boss Man.
I’ve been posting about Oaxaca for some time now, and in the beginning I believe that those who saw these posts were thinking… What’s Oaxaca have to do with us and our lives in Colorado Springs?
In fact, I had gone earlier to the local weekly, CS Indy, and they had shown zero interest in allowing me to write about Mexican events for them, or for anything on the issue to really be published there. Apparently they needed the space for more important things, like their puff piece this last issue on the newly elected Republican Congressman, Doug Lamborn, titled laughingly, ‘Rarin’ to go’.
Oh, yeah! This must be some sort of reach out to lost members of Ted Haggard’s flock, I guess? That’s the only explanation I can come up with for the publisher and editor of that paper to be running such crap. I doubt that they can outdo The Gazette though in this sappy style of …uh… ‘reporting’. I’m worried about these liberal souls over there at the Indy. I’m even scared that they may become born again evangelical pastors or some such?
But back to the world of reality. Many in Colorado began to pay more attention to Oaxaca when Gringo photographer Brad Will was shot down there like a dog. He was busy filming events for the rest of the world to be able to see, and that is just too dangerous to allow to happen freely. Some folk began to take notice of events in far off Oaxaca, though most thought of Brad as being way braver than they could ever be as Americans. And they thought more foolhardy, too.
Cut to events in Greeley and across the nation this week, as Bush sent in the INS troops to take people’s minds off his failures as US Commander in Chief in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over 1200 human beings rounded up and shackled for doing America’s nastiest work, working in slaughter houses. Families are being split asunder, children may have to permanently relocate to countries they have never known, and all of us get to ponder how more threatened we are becoming from the horde of American uniformed brownshirts, blueshirts, and khakishirts everywhere around us. Merry Christmas from Uncle Damn and Scrooge Dubya.
Even though so many folk in Greeley apparently supported rounding up their neighbors (this can be seen from the Greeley papers website where these racists post their tripe), now they are getting a quick lesson of what Oaxaca is all about. Oaxaca is about American forced trade policies (NAFTA) that have destroyed people’s livelihoods across much of Mexico, and how many of those people had to leave their homeland because of the American government’s actions just to get the same shaft here!
And in Greeley, Colorado, it’s how one’s personal racism and hatred can lead to destroying the lives of others. Not a pretty scene, as many Anglo kids go back to school and see their schoolmates being disappeared in front of their eyes. What a lesson in American citizenship for them, without doubt.
They then return home to see many of their supposedly Christian parents cheerleading for INS. Some of these parents will then be lining up for the jobs of the people victimized by this witchhunt, just like so many Germans profited from the stolen property of their Jewish neighbors once. We are a nation of immigrants, but some just go bad after a generation or two living here.
Check out the video Documentary of Oaxaca at the web site of the friendsofbradwill.com. You’ll have to punch into ‘videos’ once you reach this site. Its a lengthy documentary (28 min) , but it gives about as good and authentic of an explanation of the connections between Colorado’s world and the world of Oaxaca that might be found online right now. Well worth the time. And if you are still interested about Brad Will, scroll down to the other video called ‘I like the cops’, where Brad can be seen singing (he’s no Dylan, and I mean that in the best sense, too) and strumming the guitar while showing his love for the Men in Blue. Three minutes, and he got it all down about right.
Malachi (the man in Chicago who set himself on fire to protest the US slaughter in Iraq) and Brad, two examples of American sacrifice that inspire us. True American heroes, both in their own ways. Both trying to bring our country back to some sense of reality. Compare them to Doug Lamborn and Ted Haggard, perhaps? Oh, and compare Brad to the Men in Blue.
Two articles today in the news got me thinking about genetically modified food and bioengineering again. In short, I think we have Ag gone mad, medicine gone mad, and Hey!, we just plain got Science gone mad! What drove HighTech crazy? Unfortunately it is the same thing that is driving all of us crazy, the constant insane drive by our ruling class to find new ways to profit and to max all profits out, and to speedup profit making all for themselves. In short, their greed is doing us all in. Let’s look at the story of Mothra vs Nopalzilla first, to see what got me into a tizzy on this one. It would be comical, except it’s really not.
As we can see, the moth that came to threaten Mexico got its start 90 years ago by an attempt of ‘scientists’ to ‘bioengineer’ in Australia. Some 125 years previously, settlers in Australia had imported a dye producing bug to help color their uniforms red. How important was that! They then imported cactus nopales to feed this bug with the red dye inside. But the nopales ran amuck in Australia like the poisonous cane toads later did, and wrecked havock on the natural habitat. That’s when the genius scientists stepped in with the moth that they took from Argentina to kill the nopales. Great success!
But this moth then made its way from Australia to Florida and started heading south towards Mexico, where 1/2 of all the world’s many species of nopal lives. Stopped in Alabama, the moth decided to hit the Isla of Mujeres offshore in southern Mexico, where now it may be blown a few miles to mainland Mexico in a few days, and then go on to destroy the nopal plants that just happen to hold down much of the soil of Mexico! In short, bioengineering scientists can later be proven that they have been about as adept as the Three Stooges.
So speaking of the Stooges, we have Taco Bell and Monsanto genetically modifying corn. But these stooges forgot the scallions it seems. E-coli, served at Taco Bell in the scallions has been killing and injuring folk now in several Eastern States, and Taco Bell and US health officials initially blamed Mexican produce for that. But just today, the actual culprit had been tracked down to California once again, where just a few weeks previous the Spinach had been killing folk that had bought those nice packaged, clean looking bagged specimens we are all tempted to buy while grocery shopping. Should we really trust people like Taco Bell with the GM corn, when they can’t even get the regular old onions right? I rather think not. Plus, we have the example of Mothra and Nopalzilla, too, to also help make us think twice about the supposed benefits that the HIghTech Ag folk say will come our way with mutating corn and other farm products.
Which brings us to medical bioengineering. It’s just the big thing now to be playing with genes, Dr Moreau. Go to the journals Lancet and Scientific American, and all sorts of groovy things are on the way, they say. Not only farm animals and farm plants are going to be modified right and left genetically, but medicines, vaccines, and lab rats. And you and I are the lab rats, it appears. All disease is going to disappear due to these tinkerings! Never mind the trillions being spent to blow the world up, reduce people down to utter squalor and despair, and to make us …. well…. SICK.
We need a lot less techology guiding the world on behalf of rich pirates that own the ag labs where it is being produced, and more common sense from the peasants. So in regards to genetically engineered foods, we should still say Down With the Food Czars! They are interested in making more bucks, and not interested really in our overall health. Don’t believe that? Walk down the grocery aisles some and ponder it a little more then.
And Doctor Moreau? You scare me the most. Your bizarre experiments on us all through your med labs and hospitals are producing a monstrous world ahead. The net result of the last decades’ practice by the corporate docs, is a world of disease we never ever dreamed possible not even in Hell, all flying our way at once. Don’t believe me? Pay a visit to some of the cancer wards perhaps. Try the burn units. Try the ICUs. Then go to the labs where reaserch is done on Dr. Moreau’s creatures. Hell with George Orwell and 1984. It’s more like HG Wells and his famouns book about the mad doc, instead. Todays’s Dr Moreaus promises us vaccines to cure all diseases that taste just like lollypops to lure us aboard his grand experiment. Yes, the bioengineering story has a little of Hansel and Gretel in it, too.
Chavez won with over 60% of the vote in last Sunday’s presidential election in Venezuela. The US government is getting thumped hard in the northern regions of South America.
Washington’s man in Ecuador went down in defeat, too, just a week previous to Chavez winning his new 6 year term in office. And Colombia’s US puppet, Uribe, is facing a major scandal, as it seems that his party’s politicos are being exposed as being more death squad connected every other day now in the country’s press. Colombians are getting fed up with this murderer. Peru is unstable, and Bolivia also has gone with Evo Morales and the ‘Indians’ in the hills. What’s Washington to do?
It seems that for the moment, that Bush has decided not to go with another coup attempt in Venezuela. They would be flaming that kettle of gusanos from a position of weakness. Even Cuba looks as stable as ever. Castro is still in power, though it might be a Raul, and not a Fidel. The only area where it looks like D.C. is hanging on, is Mexico, as unstable as the current ‘dedazo’, Felipe Calderon, might be. President Fecal with his buddy Chente The Fox seems to have brutally suppressed the current rebellion in Oaxaca. And the north of Mexico appears too frozen in its shopping spree at Walmart, to raise much of a voice forward in favor of change.
Still, with Dubya in charge, Latin America will continue to disintegrate outward from US orbit. As the gringos go bankrupt, there’s not much for ‘Merica to offer in the days ahead. Viva Chavez! And the Zapatistas and APPO still are presente just south of us, too. All eyes seem focused on the Middle East, but meanwhile…. others are looking for liberation from the US, too.
It was a coincidence of sorts, but last Friday both Lebanon and Mexico found themselves engulfed in 2 huge demonstrations for basically the same reasons. Both demonstrations had as their goals getting rid of their undemocratically minded, US propped up governments.
Both demonstrations were demanding that the governments they have forced upon them at present, stop doing the bidding of the Bush Adminstration in D.C. As a result, it has been difficult in the US getting news about these huge rallies, and what commentaries I have seen in the US press border on the absurd.
As example, on Lebanon’s demonstration of approximately 1 million in the streets of Beirut, The CS Gazette carried a conservative Chicago tribune editorial that it passed off as reportage (Sat A3), that began… “After last year’s Cedar Revolution, the counter-revolution began Friday.” Pure bullshit, and typical of the Right Wing nuts at The Gazette to print this nonsense. The demands of this demonstration were for a non-representative Lebanese government that is cooperating with a foreign power, the US, to resign. Nothing counter-revolutionary about that demonstration at all, and the crowd was huge.
They were demonstrating against a government that is seen as cooperating with the US and another power, Israel, that invaded Lebanese territory and left unexploded cluster bombs everywhere. Plus, they don’t want a UN sent in by the US providing defense for another Israeli-US attack on fellow Muslim countries, Syria and Iran. Plus, they just plain want the US out of Iraq. This is a revolutionary group of people, not countrer-revolutionary as the Chicago Tribune article asserts. It always gets me when Right Wingers call their opposites ‘counter-revolutionaries’! I imagine Hitler did quite the same.
Now, let’s turn to Mexico, and see the exact same situation, and the exact same idiotic commentary inside The Gazette. Several hundred thousand demonstrated against this new, and fraudulently installed, president Fecal (FElipe CALderon). He had to be snuck in at a secret ceremony at midnight, and the national chambers of government had already been engulfed in fistfights and chaos because of the reality that a recount was denied the Mexican people, in a dubious presidential electoral processs full of illegalities. The outgoing president refused to publicly give his departure speech and instead handed it in on paper! So what does our local whigs have to say about all this, despite they hardly being able to locate Mexico on a map?
Metro section Page 6, Gazette editorial- “Mexico made progress in Fox’s six years, but now Calderon must move the country further toward a free market system and confront the increasing violoence that plagues the country.” Oh brother. The country is plagued by violence because of the government that The Gazette is supporting. In fact, to twist this reality around as this editorial does, is simply to call for Calderon to move in a manner even more repressively, to crush by yet more state terrorism, the resistance to this US puppet government. Shame on these idiots at The Gazette!
And just how damn dumb are these assholes on the editorial board there? Mexico has ‘a free market system’ already. What did they think Mexico was, the Soviet Union? What a bunch of overly miseducated twits The Gazette has stacking their editorial pages with this juvenile nonsense. They see socialism when the reality has been completely the opposite. Mexico has always been a capitalist country, and it’s been staring The Gazette in the face for decades now.
Free Lebanon and Mexico of US government stooges. These 2 puppet governments currently in power are causing thier respective peoples untold harm. Stop the US from waging yet more war in both Latin America, and the Middle East. US out of Mexico and Lebanon. US out of Iraq and Afghanistan!
When we watch the likes of an Alan Dershowitz or a Donald Rumsfield pontificating on the US government’s supposed need to use torture, even as they in the same breath deny that torture is torture or that they are advocating and using it in US prisons and elsewhere…. well… it is a sign that gangster capitalism now reigns supreme.
Other signs can be seen in countries like Mexico, Colombia, and Afghanistan…all puppet friends of the US government, btw, where mafiosos dump dead mutilated bodies daily into the streets victims of the continual drug turf wars. Well that too is another sign that today gangster capitalism is more the norm, than the exception. Too, we see gangster capitalism at work in the cases of Enron and HealthSouth. And remember the US Savings and Loan bailouts of a previous decade that opened the gates to the mafiosos? Billions hauled away by gangster capitalism’s thieves prowling the streets of our country. Gangster capitalism today has penetrated to the highest levels of our country’s political offices. It is not just a US problem. Go ask a Russian.
But the heart of gangster capitalism is ripping off the environment. It is easiest to rip off the commons, and that’s what nature is, the commons. The Pentagon is the leader in this type of gangster capitalism, as it mines, deploys toxins, explodes ordinance, and confiscates entire states and territories for its use everywhere around the planet. Gangster capitalism’s heart, if it has to be said, is a US military toxic waste dump. But the whole world has become that Pentagon dump now.
Here is a look, titled appropriately enough ‘Gangster Capitalism’, at how today’s capitalism is looting our environment. Check it out at Black Agenda Report.
Tomorrow, 4 PM, is the day of the big demonstration in Mexico City to protest the brutality of the federal police attacks on the people of Oaxaca this last weekend. Friday is to be the day of the inauguration of the declared victor of the Mexican presidential election, America’s puppet, Felipe Calderon, or ‘Fecal’ as he is best known by those who oppose this electoral fraud. Mexico is beginning to unravel, and the situation of Oaxaca is just one sign of this.
Today in yet another sign of unravelling government control, the halls of the Mexican congress erupted into fist fights. Calderon’s popular support is as thin as it could come, and six years of this US propped up clown in power is more than anybody really wants to tolerate. Mexico is beginning to unravel out of control of the neoliberal regime in DC just as have other parts of Latin America. People are fed up with their native elites following the commands they get from the White House. They are fed up with their elites living high off the hog, while their own children go hungry and die from easily preventable diseases. There is no patience or desire to tolerate D.C. control any more.
And in Mexico, many people will not just sit back and watch while yet another unpopular candidate, winning by fraud, is installed into power over them once again. Many are no longer deluded that the PRI dictatorship has been replaced by genuine democracy. A two party corporate elite dictatorship is no better than a one party one in their eyes. The PAN is no longer seen as being a democratic replacement to the old PRI dictatorship, but rather as being nothing more than a neo continuation of the same old thing. Mexico is no longer waiting for real people’s democracy. They are demanding that it be theirs now, without any more false promises from their elites of change that never comes.
In the waning last 2 weeks of the Fox Adminstration in Mexico, the Mexican government put a report quietly online admitting government criminality over 2 decades in the past. The criminality consisted of murder, torture, death squad activity, etc. in what is referred to as a ‘dirty war’ against Left activists. The time frame investigated by the authors of the report was from the late ’60s into the early ’80s, but nothing really has changed at all since then. The NY Times article about this report can be easiest read by going to antiwar.com. It is listed under their ‘Americas’ section.
Just this year, Mexican governmental forces have engaged in the same sort of activities, using them against striking miners and other Left activists in Atenco, Chiapas, and Oaxaca, where scores have been disappeared, beat up, tortured, and murdered. And that is not to mention other regions of Mexico which are less under observation by international observers. Actually the report is being used to make it appear as if Fox has taken responsibility for admitting occurrences of the past that are no longer being engaged in today. So the report is actually a style of coverup, rather than admittance of any guilt. That’s why no charges are being brought against any of the guilty parties.
All this being said, just what has been the role of the US press and the US government in its continual backing of the Mexican government? Let’s look at the New York Times, which while running the reportage of this Mexican government ‘confession’, just days previouusly was mocking Manuel Lopez Obrador for refusing to accept the fraud that put the losing candidate in office at Los Pinos, the Mexican White House. And what about admitting the US government’s role in accepting and even sponsoring the Mexican government’s terroristic counter insurgency campaigns? Silence. And the role of the American press in never coveri ng this terrorism, and in not informing the US public of the true state of affairs down South? Silence. The New York Times often times acts as if Mexico was on the other side of the moon when it comes to reporting activities there.
It always amazes me to hear our own, mainly ignorant US population spout off constantly that the Mexican government operates independently of the White House,and is independent of ‘our’ control. Yet, the same ignorant types that do this realize that the US government micro-manages areas off in the total boonies of Asia and other parts of the world. Our corporate daily press is totally complicit in keeping the US public this uninformed and backward in their views, and in keeping them believing that Mexico, which is the most important country to the US outside our own, is somehow on independent auto-pilot rather than in US control, unlike Afghanistan or Kosovo, say!
The truth is far different, and I just got through reading a John Ross report about how Halliburton is all over the still nationalized Mexican petroleum and gas industry. In fact, the man, Felipe Calderon, who stole Mexico’s presidency’s with the total support of Bush and the NY Times, has his principal goal to privatize Pemex, the government owned oil company. The Mexican government under the push by the US to do so, has already done the same with previously nationalized industries in power, communication, and transport. Now only PEMEX remains in state hands, and Halliburton certainly wants that to change as fast as possible.
The US antiwar movement needs to watch Mexico closely, and oppose our US government’s militarism promoted to the South of us. That’s where the counter insurgency programs that the Mexican government of Fox just admitted ran the country in a totally criminal manner throughout Mexico for 2 decades sprung from. That’s where the same criminality of the present springs from, US support for Mexican state terorism used against its own population. The US is messing up Mexico, messed up Mexico, and will not stop doing that until the American people begin to observe, resist their own government,and demand that the US intervention into the internal affairs of Mexico stop.
Stop the US militarization of the US-Mexican Border. Stop the phoney ‘drug war’ that is destroying Mexico, and stop training and supporting the Mexican military’s counter-insurgency against its own population!
The annual protest against the School of Americas, US military counterinsurgency school of how-to in the arts and ways of torture, is winding down today. It is a sure thing that the instruction there is being used right at this moment in Oaxaca, Mexico. The obtuse refusal of most Americans to confront his issue of what the US government does abroad clandestinely, is part and parcel of what led to 9/11, and the subsequent idiocy that is the current occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Why just a few days ago, I was pedantically told by a Colorado Springs city councilman that Mexico was a sovereign country and that our government didn’t control what happens down there. He also went on to tell me that there was no torture used inside US prisons, too! And to inform me that what he called getting tough with US military held captives was different than actually torturing them. I think it save to say that our local Colorado Springs political leadership is on an even par with the spiritual leadership of Ted Haggard and brethen.
To see some coverage in the US press of the SOA protests, go to the multimedia coverage by Columbus, Georgia’s newspaper
The week started out with a ‘weepy’ Doctor Dobson pledging to be part of the national evangelical team to rehab the now much gayer, Teddy Haggard. But within one day, Pastor-Doctor Dobson found his work schedule to be ‘too busy’ to stay with the spiritual counselling team assembled. A shame, too, since he was the big CS local authority on deviant sex, besides Haggard himself, of course. Ted will now have to depend much more on telephone spiritual counselling by a more long distance prayer team. So why did Dobson bail out on this medical case? lol…….. Can’t gays be reformed into good heterosexual family men by the power of modern day medicine welded to such strong spirituality that Dobson surely has in hand?
It’s not just me that is interested in the firm character or lack thereof of Doctor Dobson. The Gazette has printed 2 letters quite upset at our Focus on The Evangelical Family leader, and one gets the impression that they had thousands more in their offices that they could have published if the paper had just been there in sufficient enough quantities. Did Doctor Dobson jump the spiritual Titantic that Ted ran aground due to his own personal fear? Fear that all that nonsense he has preaching through the years about homosexuals just being full of sin that could be tossed aside just like that, was nothing more than total bunk. Pastor Dobson, in his soul, knows that he has been preaching a lie, I think. And he fullly expects Ted to continue with ‘sin’ once agin.
Well, even the best friendships go astray when one’s career becomes endangered. Dobson thought that distance was the best part of valor. And as distant he will try to get. Speaking of not so distant…. Mexico.
All those ‘gay marriage’ proposals that got sunk in the states, and now the Mexican people have decided to legalize gay marriage in their capital. Satan pulled a fast one, it seems. Juan Gabriel, go for it! We need more gay mariachi music up North, so we hope to see you again in Santa Fe after your honeymoon! Viva Mexico!
The Smokebrush Gallery has an exhibition of art running through November 19 at its gallery located under the bridge at 218 W. Colorado, on the theme of Pablo Picasso’s epic work in honor of a city destroyed by the Spanish fascists. That city was Guenica, Spain. I enjoyed some of the art I saw during the opening last Friday, and the prices were quite reasonable if one has the desire and money to purchase something there. There was one large painting of Disney Surreal that I liked which was only $200. A total bargain. It would definitely be an attention getter in somebody’s living room, say.
In similar vein to this exhibit, is yet another online video about the events in Oaxaca, which is a surreal montage of video shots mixed with some quite surreal grunge? music. Very effective in communicating the horrors of Mexican government repression in a style that Picasso would certainly have approved of. Check out the sight, and especially the sound, of Reimagining Oaxaca.
Daniel Ortega is back in. He has won the Nicaraguan presidential election held Sunday, with less than 40% of the vote! And we thought it idiotic when Dubya won the US election with less than 50%. These election structures that are so patently lacking in credibility would be comical, except for the fact that they are so sad. And to top the Nicaraguan election circus off, has been the media tourism down there of both Ollie North, US terrorist, and Jimmy, The Peanut Man Carter. News is in, that his stamp of approval already has fallen upon the election just held. All was done right and fair, he says. So Nicaragua has a new, yet old, president back in office who wins with only 38.5% of the vote! Good Ol’ Jimmy. He couldn’t make it to a gigantic Mexico this July, where there is substantial evidence that the declared winner won with less votes than the loser, but he could go to miniscule Nicaragua. Go figure? The Lord works in mysterious ways with this man of God.
Can’t really say much about an electoral structure that gives a win to any vote of 35% that is followed by 30% or less by candidate Number 2. What geniuses came up with that one anyway? But is it any more ridiculous than our own US gerrymandered Congressional Districts, our own system where the winner of the popular vote can actually be the loser, and where Wyoming gets the same representation as California or New York in the Senate? But you can’t beat an election system for idiocy like the Nicaraguan one, that allowed the world super power, the USA, to continually interfere in their national campaigning. That is how certainly not to run elections with any real credibility. Right, Jimmy? Wonder if he’ll be back to certify as fair our own nonsensical elections today?