Wow. Just - wow.
Topic: Politics

I wanted the tribute to Iris Marion Young to stand on it's own at the top for while, so this post is not be as timely as it otherwise could have been, but . . . 

Friday (4 August):  I just logged in to My Yahoo.  One of the features of the log-in page is a box near the top that rotates among four current news stories.  Very often they are crap - 'weird' news or celebrity news, or a filler story about what's 'hot' on the internet.  The box is eye-catching: it runs the headline, a photo, and brief summary of the article.  Today, amongst 'Top 10 Billionaire Heiresses', 'Insane Dog Mauls Elvis' Teddy Bear', and 'Bush's New Neighbor: Cindy Sheehan', was this:

Crime, Unrest Hurting Tourism in Mexico
(AP) Leftists have taken over the streets, hassling visitors and blockading buildings.  Hotels and shops in Mexico City are losing $23 million a day ... 

(screen cap here, if you'd like the full visual effect)

My little head just about exploded then.  As this article at the Guardian points out (via Para Justicia y Libertad), a very similar story was covered very very differently when the country involved was the Ukraine.

But it gets better so much worse: 

By MARK STEVENSON, Associated Press Writer

Thu Aug 3, 4:01 PM ET

MEXICO CITY - A human head washes up on an Acapulco beach. Protesters hassle visitors at makeshift checkpoints in the colonial city of Oaxaca. And in Mexico City, leftist demonstrators turn the tourist draws of Reforma Avenue and the Zocalo plaza into sprawling, ragtag protest camps.

I cannot believe this article is, effectively, equating political protests in Oaxaca and Mexico City with drug-related gang violence in Acapulco:

Protesters in Oaxaca, claiming fraud in the state gubernatorial race, have taken over the picturesque downtown to pressure Gov. Ulises Ruiz to step down. They forced the cancellation of an ethnic festival, and tourists must pass through checkpoints to reach the arch-ringed main plaza.

Protesters want to use the unrest to "force the population that relies on tourism to pressure the government," said Jose Escobar, head of the Oaxaca employers' federation.

In the Pacific resort of Acapulco, drug gangs are battling for control of lucrative smuggling and sales routes. Human heads have been dumped in front of government offices and in the glittering resort's bay. There have been gun battles on the streets.

In Mexico City, supporters of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador have taken over streets to press election officials for a re-count in the disputed July 2 presidential elections.

The rest of the article is about the protests in Mexico City.  Here's a selection:

Double-decker buses no longer tour the tree-lined Reforma, which connects the city's Chapultepec Park to the historic center but is now closed to traffic. Museums, restaurants and hotels stand largely empty.

Tourists who brave the demonstrations must skirt rickety gas cookers and duck under ropes holding up tarps as they hike back to their hotels. Mayor Alejandro Encinas said Thursday that city officials would guarantee access to hotels.

For now, helmetless motorcycle "taxi" drivers offer white-knuckle, 15-peso ($1.35) rides on the backs of their bikes, navigating past lawn chairs, cots and tents. 

Okay, so yes, political unrest makes people feel uncomfortable with idea of vacationing in a country.  I get that.  And so do the protestors:

"This is only the first step," said protester Fernando Martinez, helping block a downtown office building. "Next, we're going after the airports."

This absolutely does not in any way justify associating political protests with murders and gun battles resulting from drug-related gang activities. 

I would find the underlying approach of this article suspicious enough if it just focused on the protests, what with the references to 'ragtag' camps that must be 'braved' by tourists.  There are plenty of subtly loaded words in this article that paint a negative picture of Mexico and the protests.  The association with drug-related crimes is just . . . outrageous, ridiculous, appalling . . . where should I stop?  

Even if the protestors are breaking the law, they're inconveniencing people, not killing them.  There is a world of difference.  It's disgraceful that this article lumps these incredibly disparate phenomena together, and it lends credence to the idea that the mainstream American media are hostile to Lopez Obrador.  

 

---

 Click here to comment:postCount('JustWow'); | Click here for trackback: postCountTB('JustWow');

---

 Please ignore the comment link below

Mexico election stolen?
Topic: Politics

I like to think I'm reasonably well-informed about the major stories in world politics, but I've had to rethink that.  I managed to miss at least one BBC story about mass protests over the election in Mexico, so I had no idea there were allegations of substantial vote fraud in the Mexican presidential election until I saw this post on Women of Color Blog.  Check it out - there's some very interesting information in the links BFP selected.  Like the fact that the US had a definite interest in the outcome of this election, since Mexico is a significant source of oil for the US, and the challenger, Lopez Obrador, campaigned on a promise to keep US oil companies from owning any part of the Mexican oil system.  And there's the involvement a private company used by Katherine Harris in the 2000 election in Florida with the campaign of Felipe Calderon.  And Bush's eagerness to congratulate Felipe Calderon on his victory, despite knowing that the result was disputed.  It's all rather shady, to say the least.

The latest from the AP (via the Chicago Tribune) says:

Supporters of Mexico's leftist presidential candidate brought rush-hour traffic to a crawl Monday, causing the stock market to drop and forcing office workers dressed in business suits and high heels to hike miles to work.

The sprawling tent cities in the financial heart of the Mexican capital were another sign that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and his supporters won't accept anything less than victory from the top electoral court.

The tribunal is weighing allegations that fraud gave ruling party candidate Felipe Calderon a slight advantage in the July 2 election. It has until Sept. 6 to declare a president-elect or annul the elections.

Lopez Obrador is demanding a vote-by-vote recount, and has vowed to block the city center until the federal electoral tribunal rules on his request.

I'd just like to note that the statement that 'Lopez Obrador and his supporters won't accept anything less than victory from the top electoral court' is an interesting choice of words, because it seems to imply that the protests are aimed at overturning the election results and declaring Lopez Obrador the winner, when my understanding, based on the stories on Women of Color Blog (and the last paragraph of the excerpt above), was that the protests are aimed at getting the federal electoral tribunal to call for a full hand recount of the ballots.  (My understanding seems to be corroborated in this BBC story, which also reports that Lopez Obrador has filed a suit against the Federal Electoral Institute, charging that attack against against him were illegally funded.)  At best, it's poor writing and editing on the part of the AP to phrase that sentence in a way that confuses the reader as to the object of the protests.  

Required reading
Topic: Politics
The Washington Post published 'this story' on the Bush administration's plans not to request further funding from Congress for rebuilding in Iraq, which the Guardian drew on for it's pointed discussion of just how short the administration will fall of its stated plans for rebuilding Iraqi infrastructure. Funds that were intended for infrastructure projects had to be diverted to security measures due to the scale and persistence of the ongoing guerrilla conflict. Further evidence of just how thoroughly the Bush administration neglected to adequately plan for post-invasion security and stabilization needs in Iraq, if anyone needed it.

Freedom Is Slavery
Topic: Politics
Extraordinary rendition is not torture, because the CIA does not torture, and we don't understand why you Europeans don't trust us when we say that.

And don't miss the weasel alert at the end of Yahoo News article about Bush seeking "compromise" on the torture ban:

Hadley said Bush was troubled by revelations last week that the U.S. military secretly paid Iraqi newspapers to print pro-American articles.

He said the administration did not know all the facts, but would stop the practice if the reports turn out to be true.

"The Pentagon is looking into them. To the extent that kind of behavior is inconsistent with our policy, it will be stopped," Hadley said. (emphasis added)

Is there any extent to which that kind of behavior is consistent with policy? Because if there is, that's a damn creepy policy.

'Something concrete helps counter fear'
Topic: Politics
Despite being bogged down in essays, I am trying to keep an eye on the story about the recent arrests of alleged terrorists in Sydney and Melbourne. Given that 1) I haven't exactly been able to give it a ton of in-depth thought, 2) the story is still at the he said/she said stage, with police and the government maintaining that they've got 'the bad guys' and friends and family protesting that they haven't, and no evidence has been tested in court, I feel like its a bit premature to say much about the situation.

But I have been reading some good articles, such as this one, from Crikey, which makes the very salient point that the presence of a terrorist threat does not require total trust in the government's proposed security measures or in their handling of threat response. Which is why I'm also keeping an eye on the debate about the sedition laws that have been proposed as a counter-terrorism measure, because mechanisms like these, in a climate of fear, can be used to silence dissent.

I thought this article in the Age was pretty good in at least touching on a lot of the issues surrounding the arrest story: people's anxiety about the possibility of an attack, the feelings of people in the Muslim community about negative attention their community has received, the importance of testing the police and government's evidence in court, the risk that the accused's right to a fair trial may have been prejudiced, and the need to mitigate the alienation that members of the Muslim community already feel and to focus attention on building stronger, more inclusive communities. Granted, its a glancing treatment, but it's done the best of any single article I've read yet of providing an overview of the many factors at work in and around this situation.

Doublethink
Topic: Politics
So there's this from the AP this morning: Bush Declares: 'We Do Not Torture'

And if that's true, why did Dick Cheney, in a private meeting with Republican senators, ask them 'to allow CIA exemptions to a proposed ban on the torture of terrorist suspects in American custody.' Even though, according to the vice president, the US doesn't engage in torture:

the administration needed an exemption from any legislation banning "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment in case the president decided one was necessary to prevent a terrorist attack.
...
Cheney's decision to speak at the meeting underscored both his role as White House point man on the contentious issue and the importance the administration attaches to it.

This is particularly interesting in light of the recent NPR interview with Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, in which he alleges that:

there was a visible audit trail from the Vice President's office through the Secretary of Defense down to the commanders in the field that, in carefully couched terms, I'll give you that, that to a soldier in the field meant two things: we're not getting enough good intelligence and you need to get that evidence, and oh by the way, here are some ways you probably can get it. And even some of the ways that they detailed were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva conventions and the law of war. You just - if you're a military man you know that you just don't do these sorts of things, because once you give just the slightest bit of leeway, there are those in the armed forces who will take advantage of that, there are those in the leadership who will feel so pressured that they have to produce intelligence, that it doesn't matter if its actionable or not as long as they can get the volume in, they have to do what they have to do to get it, and so, in you've just given, in essence, though you may not know it, carte blanche for a lot of problems to occur.

I think its naive to suppose that previous administrations haven't covertly supported torture, but I find the Bush administration's overt obsession with having torture available as an option deeply disturbing. Especially since, leaving the moral questions aside for the moment, I have yet to see anyone demonstrate that torture provides good intelligence. Wilkerson's interview seems to indicate the opposite. I also think its meaningful that John McCain, who is as far as I know, one of the few US political leaders who has any personal experience of torture, has consistently opposed its use.

I really struggle to understand what's going on here, because on the one hand, at least some of the time it does seem like Dubya and maybe some of neo-con true believers, are sincerely 100% percent behind the idea that spreading freedom and democracy puts the US on the side of the angels. But how do they reconcile that with the obsession with torture, the blatant human rights violations in Guantanamo Bay, and the CIA's gulag system? I genuinely can't work out whether the administration's total inability to create even a reasonably coherent whole out of its actions and its rhetoric is a sign of fatal incompetence, staggering contempt for the electorate, or a sign of the impending apocalypse. The cynic in me says its the last, and that I should start brushing up on my Newspeak now. My few but surprisingly resilient shreds of optimism are simply shrieking "Faster! Faster!"

(links to Wilkerson interview and Abramoff-Scanlon article via Metafilter)

Another lawsuit I support
Topic: Politics
Indian woman leads multibillion fight against U.S. (Reuters)

Elouise Cobell became treasurer of the Blackfeet tribe in 1976. Her investigations into U.S. government payments to members of the tribe for land-usage rights have led her to file a $27.5 billion lawsuit against the U.S. government, alleging that the government has been cheating Indians for more than a century:

The complex dispute dates back to 1887, when the United States allotted lands to Indians but held them in trust for them. Under the arrangement, the government collects fees from ranchers, timber and oil companies or others using the land and distributes the money back tax free to individual Indians.

...

To demonstrate the confusion around the issue, she drove a visitor to several small oil wells, as well as along farm and grazing land across the Blackfeet Nation near the Canadian border. Typically the Indian owners of that land know little of the deals the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) have arranged there, she said.

Cobell pulled out a photocopy of a May check for $69.35 she received from the Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians. The stub offers no explanation. Cobell said she did not know whether the amount is for oil or other rights on her family land.

"This is an outrage," said Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer. "If you had a private company that managed a trust like the BIA managed the trust for these Indian families, you'd put them in jail -- for a long time."

...

"We're not going to roll over and play dead any more," said Cobell, who has has become a celebrity in Indian country and raised $11 million for the court fight. "I made the decision a long time ago when I was a lot younger than 59 years old to fight it for the long haul."

"I really thought the litigation would not take as long as it has."

Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, has sought a comprehensive settlement to be approved by Congress to avoid decades of litigation.

...

Cobell says a settlement could include a time-payment plan or the allocation of assets rather than cash. "We would be willing to consider other avenues such as a longer period of time to pay it," she said. "If you don't have the cash, let's talk about some of this land we can take back."

Unsettling local news
Topic: Politics

"An American peace activist detained in a Melbourne jail cell will leave the country within days but his legal team says they will continue the fight to clear his name."

...

We don't have any idea why this assessment has been made ... and he has been given no information on why he has been detained other than that he supposedly poses a risk to national security."

(from The Age)

Synopsis: Houston peace activist Scott Parkin comes to Australia on a tourist visa, spends three months here, helps stage a protest (described here as "anti-war street theatre") outside Halliburton's Sydney offices a couple weeks ago, is subsequently interviewed by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), has his visa revoked by the Department of Immigration, and is arrested in Melbourne on Saturday while on his way to a workshop on the Iraq war. He is now being held in jail at his own expense ($125 per day) and apparently will be deported within days (at his own request, as apparently he doesn't care for indefinite incarceration), and will be charged the cost of his own ticket, plus those of two escorts.

Note to self: At all costs, avoid being seen in vicinity of any Halliburton offices in Australia.

See also, Barista.

Update: For a funny, full-on, illustrated rant employing language of which your mother (well, maybe not your mother, but definitely my mother) would not approve, see Reasons You Will Hate Me.

Update, of sorts, since it's more like filling in the back story, but I just found this article from earlier today in which one of Parkin's lawyers says that the immigration department was refusing to deport Parkin, and that "Mr Parkin had been told by immigration officers that his deportation would be brought forward if he dropped his appeal to the Migration Review Tribunal to find out why his visa was revoked."

Also, the Australian Attorney-General had this to say about the case:

"The reason he's in custody is because his visa has been cancelled. The reason his visa has been cancelled is because he's received an adverse security assessment," Mr Ruddock said.

"ASIO is responsible for protecting the Australian community from all forms of politically motivated violence, including violent protest activity, and they've made an assessment in relation to those matters."

Yet none of the articles mention any sort of violent activity engaged in by Parkin during his time in Australia. Apparently, no one was even detained during the protest in Sydney.

And, finally, nice sign.

Charming
Topic: Politics
John Brogden, the leader of the opposition Liberal Party in New South Wales has announced his resignation after "let[ting] some steam off" at recent function by having a few beers, calling the wife of the state premier (who had recently announced his resignation) a "mail-order bride", and harassing two female journalists. As The Age observes, this is the kind of story that gets the bloggers out in force. Ausculture has a wickedly (as in, "not for the easily offended") funny recreation of Brogden's internal monologue from the evening in question. See the comments section for Carr's pointed cut-down of Brogden. But the best post title has to be "The Sound of a Thousand Hands Hitting a Thousand Foreheads", from Moment to Moment, home of the Naked Knitting Feminist World Domination Circle, and quite possibly my new favorite blog.

Aug. 31: "The Sound of a Thousand Bloggers Struggling to Say Something Sensible". Brogden has attempted suicide. Some reaction here. Granted that I'm as quick as anyone to slag off politicians, I do think it's sad that becoming a politician seems somehow to render a person not human in the eyes of the political system, in that their mistakes and their suffering become grist for the political mill, used by parties and the media to advance various agendas. The spin never stops, and any sympathy expressed in the media is always suspect. It's a shame that the system seems to leave little or no room for sincerity.

I feel dirty
Topic: Politics
And all I've been doing is reading about the operations of Congress. Even granted that in this article in Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi is utterly and relentlessly cynical about the workings of the US government from the start, when a month of observation of Congressional activity leads him to this conclusion:

I get the strong impression that even the idealists in Congress have learned to accept the body on its own terms. Congress isn't the steady assembly line of consensus policy ideas it's sold as, but a kind of permanent emergency in which a majority of members work day and night to burgle the national treasure and burn the Constitution. A largely castrated minority tries, Alamo-style, to slow them down -- but in the end spends most of its time beating calculated retreats and making loose plans to fight another day.

Taken all together, the whole thing is an ingenious system for inhibiting progress and the popular will. The deck is stacked just enough to make sure that nothing ever changes. But just enough is left to chance to make sure that hope never completely dies out. And who knows, maybe it evolved that way for a reason.

its not hard to understand what prompted (or perhaps, just reinforced) all the bitterness and disillusionment.

When it comes to goverment, H.L. Mencken almost never got it wrong: "Every decent man [sic] is ashamed of the government he lives under."

(via Metafilter)