Alice Embree : ‘Fierce Women’ March in San Antonio

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

International Women’s Day:
‘Fierce women’ keeping the faith

By Alice Embree | The Rag Blog | March 5, 2012

See gallery of photos by Carlos Lowry and Susan Van Haitsma, Below.

SAN ANTONIO — For the third year I traveled south from Austin to San Antonio to take part in their International Women’s Day march with others from CodePink Austin. It was the twenty-second annual Women’s Day celebration in that city, which has kept the faith better than any city I know of.

The march did not disappoint. A blustery wind whipped against our banner, “Women Say No to War,” when we left from the Grand Hyatt on Saturday, March 3. But the wind died down as we made the now familiar trek to Milam Park and the Plaza del Zacate. CodePink Austin invoked various “Supershero powers” as the contingent marched in costumes, adorned with capes and crowns, and accompanied by a prison-garbed and shackled “war criminal.”

The International Women’s Day celebration was organized by a coalition of “fierce mujeres” from community and social justice organizations — union organizers for nurses, hotel workers, and domestic workers, advocates for reproductive choice and LGBTQ rights.

Graciela Sanchez of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, her mother, Isabel Sanchez, two women from Fuerza Unida, and a former councilwoman carried the leadoff banner for the march. Other banners and signs displayed the diversity of causes and issues, calling for an end to NAFTA and to war, defending immigrant rights and decrying the border wall.

Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

The generations ranged from Girl Scout participants and the youth of the Martinez Street Women’s Center to the elders like Graciela Sanchez who have kept this tradition alive for more than two decades. Indigenous dancers and a calavera (skeleton) -clad duo were reminders of the Native American and Mexican ancestry of South Texas.

San Antonio displayed once again its ease with crossing boundaries of race, age, class, national origin, and sexual orientation. The call for the march proclaimed:

We, like women and girls all over the world, are the voices of conscience, the roots of change, and the leaders of local and global movements. We seek healthcare, housing, education, environmental justice, and fair wages, not just as women, but also as people of color, as youth and elders, as immigrants and indigenous people, as lesbian, bisexual, intersex, two-spirit, transgender, and queer women, and as poor and working class people.

We oppose all forms of violence. We advocate for reproductive choice. We call for an end to war, genocide, and occupation. We claim our own voices and come together to share them in public space. We march in solidarity with women and social justice movements around the world.

I hope that we in Austin will again see such a diverse coalition of fierce women. As the Republican primary candidates attempt to dial us back to the 50s, as women’s basic healthcare comes under attack, as women are advised to “hold an aspirin between their knees” as cheap birth control, as Rush Limbaugh hurls accusations of “slut” and “prostitute” at a college student defending access to birth control, the need for outrage and ferocity grows.

Austin musician Marcia Ball is “seeing red” and calling for women (and men) to join her wearing red on the Capitol steps each of the next three Tuesdays — March 6, 13, and 20 — from noon until 2 p.m. On March 9 at 7 p.m., a presentation at Austin’s feminist bookstore, BookWoman, will remind us of the beginnings of the women’s movement, with clips from an upcoming movie, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry.

Time to let the rage out of the bottle, sisters. I guess it’s the only thing Rush and the two Ricks can understand.

[Alice Embree is a long-time Austin activist, organizer, and member of the Texas State Employees Union. A former staff member of underground papers, The Rag in Austin and RAT in New York, and a veteran of SDS and the women’s liberation movement, she is now active with CodePink Austin and Under the Hood Café. Embree is a contributing editor to The Rag Blog and is treasurer of the New Journalism Project. Read more articles by Alice Embree on The Rag Blog.]

Also see: “San Antonio: Thousands Rally for International Women’s Day,” by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / March 8, 2010

Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

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Posted on March 5, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

International Women’s Day

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / March 5, 2012

SAN ANTONIO — For the third year I traveled south from Austin to San Antonio to take part in their International Women’s Day march with others from CodePink Austin. It was the twenty-second annual Women’s Day celebration in that city, which has kept the faith better than any city I know of.

The march did not disappoint. A blustery wind whipped against our banner, “Women say no to war,” when we left from the Grand Hyatt on Saturday, March 3. But the wind died down as we made the now familiar trek to Milam Park and the Plaza del Zacate. CodePink Austin invoked various “Supershero powers” as the contingent marched in costumes, adorned with capes and crowns, and accompanied by a prison-garbed and shackled “war criminal.”

The celebration was organized by a coalition of “fierce mujeres” from community and social justice organizations — union organizers for nurses, hotel workers, and domestic workers, advocates for reproductive choice and LBGTQ rights.

Graciela Sanchez of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, her mother, Isabel Sanchez, two women from Fuerza Unida, and a former councilwoman carried the leadoff banner for the march. Other banners and signs displayed the diversity of causes and issues, calling for and end to NAFTA and to war, defending immigrant rights and decrying the border wall.

The generations ranged from Girl Scout participants and the youth of the Martinez Street Women’s Center to the elders like Graciela Sanchez who have kept this tradition alive for more than two decades. Indigenous dancers and a calavera (skeleton) -clad duo were reminders of the Native American and Mexican ancestry of south Texas.

San Antonio displayed once again its ease with crossing boundaries of race, age, class, national origin, and sexual orientation. The call for the march proclaimed:

We, like women and girls all over the world, are the voices of conscience, the roots of change, and the leaders of local and global movements. We seek healthcare, housing, education, environmental justice and fair wages, not just as women, but also as people of color, as youth and elders, as immigrants and indigenous people, as lesbian, bisexual, intersex, two-spirit, transgender, and queer women, and as poor and working class people.

We oppose all forms of violence. We advocate for reproductive choice. We call for an end to war, genocide, and occupation. We claim our own voices and come together to share them in public space. We march in solidarity with women and social justice movements around the world.

I hope that we in Austin will again see such a diverse coalition of fierce women. As the Republican primary candidates attempt to dial us back to the 50s, as women’s basic healthcare comes under attack, as women are advised to “hold an aspirin between their knees” as cheap birth control, as Rush Limbaugh hurls accusations of “slut” and “prostitute” at a college student defending access to birth control, the need for outrage and ferocity grows.

Austin musician Marcia Ball is “seeing red” and calling for women (and men) to join her wearing red on the Capitol steps each of the next three Tuesdays, March 6, 13, and 20, from noon until 2 p.m. On March 9 at 7 p.m., a presentation at Austin’s feminist bookstore, BookWoman, will remind us of the beginnings of the women’s movement, with clips from an upcoming movie, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry.

Time to let the rage out of the bottle, sisters. I guess it’s the only thing Rush and the two Ricks can understand.

[Alice Embree is a long-time Austin activist, organizer, and member of the Texas State Employees Union. A former staff member of underground papers, The Rag in Austin and RAT in New York, and a veteran of SDS and the women’s liberation movement, she is now active with CodePink Austin and Under the Hood Café. Embree is a contributing editor to The Rag Blog and is treasurer of the New Journalism Project. Read more articles by Alice Embree on The Rag Blog.]

Also see “San Antonio: Thousands Rally for International Women’s Day,” by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / March 8, 2010

Photos by Carlos Lowry:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlos/sets/72157629141475946/with/6950632055/


Type rest of the post here

Source /

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Posted on March 5, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Olympia Snow and Andrew Breibart:
Is it the end of an era?

By Danny Schechter | The Rag Blog | March 5, 2012

There was an eerie synchronicity in the pending resignation of veteran Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, a Republican who had more than she could take of hyper-partisan “conservative” correct-lineism in Congress, and the death of Andrew Breitbart, the right-wing provocateur who did his very best to create the dynamic that Snowe was rejecting.

She would never use the language of her Party-mate Rick Santorum who confessed that some policies he disagreed with made him want to throw up, but if we lived in the age when all roads led to Rome, Congress would surely have its own vomitorium in the basement and it would be well-attended.

Breibart’s unexpected passing of “natural causes” might foreshadow the death of his political brand just as Snowe’s retreat to the state lobsters made famous may mark the end of the center in the GOP.

There was nothing natural about Andrew’s angst and activism as he smeared and bullied political opponents with the full support of the extremist echo chamber that helped him build his career.

There was no tactic that was too unethical in his aggressive arsenal that relished embarrassing and exposing enemies with videos and bombast,

After he died, the likes of Matt Drudge and Michelle Malkin were there with teary condolences as were his adoring staff members who posted this testimonial: “Andrew lived boldly, so that we more timid souls would dare to live freely and fully, and fight for the fragile liberty he showed us how to love.”

What he did love was to retweet every criticism he received as badges of honor in what seemed like an endless self-promoting crusade. No wonder, the right wing blogosphere is in mourning, echoing each other’s laments.

Brinart’s spirit was animated by a large dose of Stalin.

Conservative Ron Deher wrote,

I couldn’t stand some of what Breitbart did, and criticized certain of his stunts on this blog. But Lord have mercy, a 43-year-old man dropped dead and left a widow and four fatherless children. He was a provocateur, not a criminal. The thing Breitbart suffered from is the same thing… too many of us suffer from: making ideology more important than basic human decency.

David Frum, the man who coined the phrase “axis of evil,” was honest enough to admit

that to speak only “good” of Breitbart would be to misunderstand the man. The good was there. Breitbart was by all accounts generous with time and advice, a loving husband and father, and a loyal friend.

Yet perhaps Breitbart’s most consequential innovation was his invention of a new kind of culture war, and it’s difficult to assess his impact on American media and politics if you withhold an objective evaluation of his career — a career that was so representative of his times.

It was that “culture war” that offended a cultured senator like Olympia Snowe who said she was through with the spirit of confrontation and polarization that drives politics, fed up with an environment which has no room for individual conscience or dissent.

NPR reported,

Politico’s Jonathan Allen published a piece that epitomizes this genre today. The article, “The center crumbles,” laments that “Congress can’t find the middle ground because no one’s willing and able to stand there anymore.”

For some like Snowe, the question is, why bother? The prospect of running hard to win another term — particularly a six-year Senate term — is less and less attractive for folks who came to Washington to make things happen only to find out there’s no common ground to get things done, only partisan point-scoring that leads to paralyzed politics.

Some years ago when I was making the film In Debt We Trust, I spent a long night in Congress waiting to interview Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee who was then speaking on the floor against Republican demands that the United States seal both our Southern and Northern borders with a fence or East Berlin-like high wall to stop illegal immigrants.

She very calmly challenged the idea with facts and figures that seemed very rational and to the point.

But when the vote came, all of the Republicans were looking down at their blackberries where they were being instructed on how to vote by their leadership.

Despite agreeing with some of the points she made in the debate, the GOP voted as a block, no deviations! That was before the Tea Party fanatics moved in and frequently rejected the advice of their whips because it was not obstructionist enough.

Those were Breibart’s ideas in action. The Los Angeles Times praised him for turning media manipulation into an art:

Breitbart was a revolutionary eager to overthrow a media establishment that he viewed as a front for left-wing social causes. Always brimming with righteous indignation — before he died, his final tweet offered an explanation for why he’d called an adversary a “putz” — he had contempt for anything that smacked of liberal do-gooderism or hypocrisy.

In his last known conversation in an LA bar he blamed liberals for forcing the GOP to debate social issues so they could challenge them. To him, like generations of anti-communists before him, there was always a liberal (his version of communist) under every bed.

Noted writer Patrick Goldstein said,

Breitbart would’ve been a marginal figure if he had simply been a media gadfly. His genius was rooted in the realization that in the new media universe, being outrageous often gets far more attention than being authoritative. After Ted Kennedy died in 2009, when everyone else was lionizing the great liberal crusader, Breitbart ripped him as a “duplicitous bastard” He also called him a “prick” and “a special pile of human excrement.”

Personally, he went from a liberal family to join a reactionary community. He helped found Huffington Post. Appearances on Bill Maher’s shows and Fox News programs helped build his national celebrity even as he co-wrote a book criticizing the celebrity culture that propelled him into national visibility.

Many on the left lacked his sophistication and were unprepared to respond to his attacks. Organizations like ACORN, known for grassroots organizing and voter registration, were destroyed by Breibart’s calculated shock tactics, partly because his undercover gang with video cameras understood its vulnerabilities and played on its naiveté. Rather than defending them, many Democrats rushed to distance themselves and in the process helped defund an important organizing force.

He was less effective in his campaign against Occupy Wall Street but what he lacked in invective, local police forces more than made up for with spying, surveillance, and physical attacks on Occupy. He was a cheerleader for this repressive response.

He did seem to have some loose screws, though. According to Wikipedia,

At the Conservative Political Action Conference convention in Washington, D.C., on February 10, 2012, a belligerent Breitbart was captured walking with a glass of wine, screaming a diatribe at protesters, including repeatedly calling them “filthy freaks” and “murderers,” demanding that they “stop raping the people.” He was restrained by convention hotel security, resisting as they physically pushed him away from the demonstration.

He wanted his enemies to hate him, and, no surprise, many reciprocated in kind.

Wikipedia also noted that

Breitbart often appeared as a speaker at Tea Party movement events across the U.S. For example, Breitbart was a keynote speaker at the first National Tea Party Convention at Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville on February 6, 2010.

Whats the lesson for the left?

No one would suggest emulating Breitbart’s deliberately deceptive methods, but perhaps his example argues that the activists he sought to destroy need more audacity, more discipline, and more cleverness in exposing right-wing media with better alliances and collaborations. They need to create mutually supportive echo chambers that go on the offensive as opposed to just reacting to attack.

They also need to try to seize the national stage, not shrink from it for fear of being co-opted.

Olympia Snow deserves our respect for taking the stand she did. Andrew Breibart didn’t deserve to die at age 43, but — who besides acolytes and his own ditto-heads, including many haters — will really honor his legacy?

[News Dissector Danny Schechter writes the News Dissector blog and edits the new Mediachannel1.org. His new book is Occupy: Dissecting Occupy Wall Street. (ColdType.net). Email Danny at dissector@mediachannel.org. Read more by Danny Schechter on The Rag Blog.]

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Jim Hightower : The Keystone XL Flim-Flam

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Valero refinery in Port Arthur, Texas. Image from Nation of Change.

The Keystone XL flim-flam

The dirty little secret that those pushing so urgently for building Keystone XL don’t want you to know is that the tar sands oil producers are in cahoots with Texas refineries to move the product onto the lucrative global export market…

By Jim Hightower / Reader Supported News / March 4, 2012

For Rep. Allen West, the skyrocketing price of gasoline is not just a policy matter, it’s a personal pocketbook issue. The Florida tea-party Republican (who, of course, blames President Obama for the increase) recently posted a message on Facebook wailing that it’s now costing him $70 to fill his Hummer H3.

It’s hard to feel the pain of a whining, $174,000-a-year Congress-critter, but millions of regular Americans really are feeling pain at the pump — especially truck drivers, cabbies, farmers, commuters,and others whose livelihoods are tethered to the whims of Big Oil.

It’s an especially cynical political stunt, then, for congressional Republicans, GOP presidential wannabes, and a chorus of right-wing mouthpieces to use gas price pain as a whip for lashing out at Obama’s January decision to reject the infamous Keystone XL pipeline.

This friendly Canadian corporation, they cried, would send 700,000 barrels of “tar sands crude” oil per day through the 2,000-mile-long pipeline that it would build from Alberta, Canada, to Texas refineries on the Gulf Coast. “Less dependence on OPEC,” they chant like a mantra, “more gasoline for America, lower prices for consumers.”

What’s not to like?

Well, aside from inevitable environmental damage from pipeline leaks, and the fact that this foreign-owned corporation would use the autocratic power of eminent domain to take land from unwilling sellers along the 2,000 mile route, here’s something not to like: The gasoline and diesel that would be made from this Canadian crude would not go to American gas pumps, but to foreign markets.

The dirty little secret that those pushing so urgently for building Keystone XL don’t want you to know is that the tar sands oil producers are in cahoots with Texas refineries to move the product onto the lucrative global export market, selling it to buyers in Europe, Latin America and China — not to you and me.

The pipeline and the toxic crude it would carry across six states would do absolutely nothing to shave even a penny off of the price we pay at the pump.

Already, U.S. refineries are exporting record amounts of the gasoline they make. For the first time in 62 years, America is now a net petroleum exporter. Valero Energy Corp., the largest U.S. exporter of refined petroleum products, is a major lobbyist for Keystone XL.

Along with Motiva (an oil refiner jointly owned by Shell and Saudi Aramco) and Total (a French refinery), Valero has signed secret, long-term contracts with Keystone’s owner (TransCanada Corp.) and several tar sands oil producers to bring this crude to Port Arthur, Texas. All three have upgraded their refineries there to process diesel for export.

Adding to Big Oil’s enjoyment is the fact that the Port Arthur refineries of Valero, Motiva, and Total are within a Foreign Trade Zone, giving them special tax breaks for shipping gasoline and diesel out of our country.

And adding to the dismay of some U.S. consumers, TransCanada has quietly boasted that Keystone XL would cut gasoline supplies in our Midwestern states, thus raising prices at the pump and siphoning more billions of dollars a year from consumers pockets into the vaults of multinational oil interests.

So, lets tally the score in this Keystone pipeline deal: The American people’s environment would be put at risk, foreign nations would get the fuel, pipeline and oil investors would get the tax-subsidized profits, and we’d all stay hooked on deadly polluting oil.

Meanwhile, the financial speculators and supply manipulators who are artificially causing our gasoline prices to rise escape scrutiny, while self-serving politicians (tanked up on Big Oil’s and Wall Street’s campaign cash) divert attention to the bugaboo of Obama’s pipeline decision.

And, yet again, our nation has an excuse to postpone the necessary investments in conservation, alternative fuels, and mass transit that would actually solve the gas-gouging problem.

What’s not to like?

[Jim Hightower, a radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and former Texas Agriculture Commissioner, edits the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. This article was published by Creators Syndicate and distributed by Reader Supported News. Read more articles by and about Jim Hightower on The Rag Blog.]

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Posted on March 4, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Richard Raznikov tells us that “all across the western world, there is enormous pressure… to ‘privatize’ everything.” Severing the connection between the public and the “management of and control over public resources and operations” is dangerous, he says. For instance, “Does anyone have to ask what happens to law enforcement and the judicial system once the state agrees to keep private prisons at 90% of capacity?”

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David P. Hamilton : Guatemala’s Perez Molina Wants to Legalize all Drugs

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, left, with his Defense Minister Ulises Ansueto Giron, during a ceremony in Guatemala City in January. Photo from AFP / Tico Times.

Otto Perez Molina and the Drug War

Perez Molina surprised everyone by announcing that he was going to propose to his fellow Latin American leaders the complete legalization of drugs throughout Central America, Mexico, and Colombia.

By David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog / March 1, 2012

GUATEMALA CITY — On January 14, 2012, Otto Perez Molina was inaugurated as the new president of Guatemala. This justly inspired an outcry of anguish among leftists everywhere.

Perez Molina has a seriously marred resume. He is an ex-Guatemalan army general who specialized in intelligence and who was present in the Quiche Department during the massacres of the Ixil-speaking Maya. Survivors have identified him as having personally tortured them. He served in the notoriously brutal special forces known as the Kaibles as their director of intelligence. He is a graduate of the Guatemalan National Military Academy and the School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia.

In 1992, Perez Molina was the Director of Military Intelligence when guerrilla leader Efrain Bámaca Velásquez disappeared. Bámaca’s wife, American lawyer Jennifer Harbury, claims that Perez Molina gave the orders to torture and kill her husband.

There are also allegations that Perez Molina participated in the 1998 murder of Juan José Gerardi, the Roman Catholic bishop of Guatemala and a prominent human rights advocate.

How could such a ghastly individual be elected president of Guatemala, a country whose population is half Maya, in the midst of the leftist ascendancy in Latin America? To understand the answer to that question, one must consider other aspects of Perez Molina that appealed to voters and understand the current political climate of Guatemala.

To his credit, in 1983 Perez Molina participated in the coup that overthrew Efrian Rios Montt, the most egregious of all the Guatemalan military dictators during the civil war. That coup brought to power General Oscar Mejia Victorias. Both Rios Montt and Mejia Vitorias are still alive and both have been charged with genocide by Spanish courts. Rios Montt is currently on trial for the same offense in Guatemalan courts.

There are those in the human rights community who say that the only difference between Rios Montt and Mejia Victorias was that the former was a militant evangelical, whereas the latter was a nominal Catholic; that they followed the same counter-insurgency strategy. Others contend that there was a split in the Guatemalan army between the “dinosaurs” such as Rios Montt who wanted to “dry up the sea” in which the guerrillas swam by killing the Maya or relocating them to concentration camps, and the “constitutionalistas” who recognized the need for a political component in order to end the war.

Despite presiding over the killing of thousands more Maya after taking power, Mejia Victorias got rid of Rios Montt, reduced the level of violence, handed over power to the first elected civilian government in decades (albeit under a military thumb) and set in motion the process that eventually resulted in a peace treaty to end the civil war. As is typical in U.S. politics, at least he was better than the other guy.

This faction fight in the military remains a blood feud 30 years later. When Rios Montt’s protégé, Alfonso Portillo, became president in 2000, Mejia Victorias fled into exile in Spain and Perez Molina resigned from the military. Now Perez Molina shows no sign of interfering with the trial of Rios Montt who is under house arrest and being prosecuted by a militant woman attorney general. Meanwhile, his 81-year old mentor, Mejia Victorias, hangs out with old friends in Antigua’s delightful central park.

While serving as chief of military intelligence in 1993, Perez Molina “was instrumental” in stopping then President Jorge Serrano, who had tried to dissolve the legislature and reappoint a new supreme court so he could rule by fiat. Serrano was quickly forced to flee the country along with his vice-president.

His successor, selected by the Congress from a short list reputedly provided by Bill Clinton, was Ramiro de Leon Carpio, who had previously been Guatemala’s human rights ombudsman and had defended Rigoberta Menchu. Perez Molina became de Leon Carpio’s chief of staff and represented the Guatemalan military in the negotiations that eventually led to the 1996 Peace Accords.

Another facet of Perez Molina is his personal experience as a victim of political violence. In early 2000, he retired from the military in order to found a new political party to challenge the Rios Montt faction that held the presidency and had the largest party in the Congress.

In November of that year, Perez Molina’s son was attacked by gunmen while driving with his wife and infant daughter. Three months later, on the eve of Perez Molina’s announcing his new party’s formation, his daughter was wounded by gunmen on the same day that a woman was gunned down immediately after having left a meeting with Perez’s wife.

During his 2007 campaign for president, several members of Perez’s political party were murdered, including a 33-year-old Maya woman who was one of his principal aides.

Guatamelan president Otto Perez Molina. Photo from AP / The Telegraph.

Perez Molina’s predecessor as president, Alvaro Colom, had defeated him in 2007. Colom came into office as a moderate leftist, but he was a disappointment, considered weak and suspected of corruption. Because Guatemala’s constitution bars a president from running again, Colom tried to have his wife run instead. It was widely reported that she ran the government already.

In order to advance this ploy, they got a divorce. But the Guatemalan Supreme Court wouldn’t buy it and she wasn’t allowed to run. No other left-leaning candidate was successful in getting into the second round run off.

Perez Molina ran the most expensive campaign in the history of Guatemala. His opponent was Manuel Baldizon, described as a multimillionaire Christian populist and proponent of the death penalty who wants to fight crime by televising executions. Both ran with women as their vice-presidents.

Baldizon is a very rich man from the part of the country where the drug gangs are the strongest. Because the drug cartels are so rich and powerful in Guatemala, it is widely assumed that both candidates in the run-off were supported by drug money.

Perez Molina ran for president pledging a “mano duro” against crime. This term has rather sinister connotations in the context of Guatemala. It can be interpreted as somewhere between firm hand and iron fist. Presidents during the civil war used the same term to describe their approach to the insurgency.

Crime is overwhelmingly the consensus number one issue in Guatemala and everyone wants a government that will somehow reduce it. Guatemala’s largest industry is tourism, which has been severely hurt by the country’s reputation for violence. The U.S. Embassy reports that “Guatemala has one of the highest violent crime rates in Latin America.” Currently Guatemala has the seventh highest homicide rate in the world and the successful prosecution rate is negligible.

The bordering countries of Belize (6th), El Salvador (2nd) and Honduras (1st) are worse. In the first seven months of 2011, approximately 42 murders a week were reported in Guatemala City, a city of 2.5 million. Illegal drug money fuels this violence. Perez Molina won the presidency primarily because he was the only candidate who ran convincingly on this issue.

At the time of Perez Molina’s inauguration, critics were warning of the carnage to come. Indeed, his first move was to employ the army to back up the police. Then, a month into office, he surprised everyone by announcing that he was going to propose to his fellow Latin American leaders the complete legalization of drugs throughout Central America, Mexico, and Colombia.

We’re not talking here about the legalization of an ounce of pot for personal use or some other minimal measure. He’s talking about complete legalization — possession, transportation, production, et al, of all illegal drugs. He has said that the evidence clearly shows that the long-standing effort to repress illegal drug use has failed and that different approaches must be considered — such as employing market forces instead of military forces.

He says he will put this proposal on the agenda at the next meeting of regional leaders. However you might decide to interpret this, it was a very radical move, way outside the boundaries of previous discourse. Suddenly, the terms of debate are entirely different. Is he proposing to reduce crime by the simple procedure of making fewer things illegal?

This move has led to considerable speculation as to his motives, everyone having the idea that he’s actually angling for something else. In the The Atlantic magazine, Natalie Kitroeff, a research associate in the Latin America program of the Council on Foreign Relations, says he’s doing it to pressure the U.S. to lift the embargo on selling arms to Guatemala that has been in place since 1978.

But the logic of her argument is that Perez Molina is very publicly calling into question the whole rationale of the Drug War in order to extort the U.S. to give him more money and arms to fight the Drug War. In other words, its open season for speculation and no one really knows what this guy is up to, but everyone assumes that there is a separate agenda lurking somewhere.

Drug war violence in Central America. Image from Foreign Policy.

It might be appropriate here to consider the contrast between the neighboring cities of Ciudad Juarez in Mexico and El Paso, Texas, USA. The former has one of the highest homicide rates in the world. The latter, just across the dribble known on its north bank as the Rio Grande, has the lowest murder rate of any American city.

However you might choose to explain this phenomenon, some facts are obvious. The drug cartels exist inside the U.S. in large numbers, but they don’t fight there, clear evidence of an agreement to a truce among them. When was the last time you heard of Mexican cartels shooting it out in the streets of LA, a city with several million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans?

They also don’t fight in Mexico City, which has one-third the murder rate of Washington, DC. The heavy price for the Drug War is being paid in blood that flows almost entirely south of the border along the drug transit lanes — the coasts of Mexico and Central America and the U.S.-Mexico border region.

In addition, the illegal drug industry is corrupting the political processes and judicial systems in the whole region. The resulting mayhem is ruining tourism and besmirching their reputations in general. This becomes very much a national security issue for a country like Guatemala and Perez Molina named his political party the Patriot Party.

On the other side of the border in the U.S., the Drug War remains useful to the power elite by providing an excuse to throw thousands of young, mostly-nonwhite men in prison, but generally folks up there are just gettin’ high and ignoring the carnage down south. The U.S. marijuana laws are in an advanced state of decay, the dam having been broken in numerous localities by the medical marijuana movement, most notably California.

Domestic production and consumption of pot in the U.S. have never been higher and there is no shortage. Principled potheads shun “cartel pot.” Although the U.S. remains the world’s largest consumer of cocaine, that market isn’t growing and the street price continues to decline due to oversupply. The market metrics point to declining profits.

Forces supporting legalization of now illegal drugs are gaining momentum throughout Latin America and beyond. Former presidents Vicente Fox and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, and Cesar Gaviria of Colombia, have signed statements and written articles calling for the legalization or decriminalization of drugs. The current presidents of Mexico and Colombia say they are open to discussing the issue.

A recent report from The Global Commission on Drug Policy, backed by high-profile political figures (including former presidents of Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Switzerland, the incumbent Prime Minister of Greece, the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, the former European Union High Commissioner Javier Solana, and the British billionaire Richard Branson, among others) argues for a move away from the “zero tolerance” approach.

A conference of Latin American leaders last December in Mexico made “an unambiguous call” to legalize and regulate drugs. That conference was attended by the presidents of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama, the vice-president of Costa Rica, and the foreign ministers of El Salvador, Belize, and Colombia. Their closing statement was a clear acknowledgement that the war on drugs is fueling much of the violence and chaos in their countries.

Exacerbating their dissatisfaction with the U.S.’s lack of success at reducing consumption, the Obama administration is planning to reduce anti-drug trafficking funds to Latin America next year by 16%, including a 60% reduction in such aid to Guatemala. Latin Americans ask themselves, why should we put up our money to fight the U.S.’s drug war when they won’t pay their share or reduce consumption?

Supporters of legalization talk about the effects of allowing market forces to come into play. If currently illegal drugs were legalized in Latin America, they could be shipped north via normal means. The shippers wouldn’t need expensive private airplanes and submarines when DHL will take it as far as Nuevo Laredo. They also wouldn’t need a private army to protect it all along the way. Legitimate business people would become involved and the cartels would be forced to compete and move their money into other areas as the price for their product dropped and their profit margins shrunk.

As the Rand Corporation predicted relative to the possible legalization of marijuana in California in 2010, the price of the drugs on the street would collapse. Only illegality makes the product expensive. Removing much of the money from the industry is the heaviest blow that can be dealt to the drug lords.

As the history of the prohibition of alcohol in the U.S. might suggest, more and more Latin American leaders are thinking that the only way to reduce the violence that plagues their countries is drug legalization. This puts them on a collision course with the U.S. government, regardless of which party is in power.

If Perez Molina and other Latin American leaders do indeed take money from the cartels, Perez Molina’s recent moves would indicate that at least some cartel owners are willing to sacrifice their current mega-profits for peace and legitimacy. It was recently reported that Zetas were living in campers so that their mobility would impede their arrest. They might prefer a house instead.

In this context, the idea of dumping the whole problem in Washington’s lap has considerable appeal to Latin American leaders located between the sources in the south and the big consumer up north. They could free resources to repress violence instead of bothering about the drugs.

Much of the rationale for the violence disappears and much of the money is taken out of the market when these products are no longer illegal. And the inherent anti-Americanism of legalization might be an issue that unites Latin American leaders across the political spectrum. Indeed, the more conservative leaders are taking the lead on this, although ex-coca grower Evo Morales is doubtless on board.

Now Perez Molina has thrown the fat on the fire in a highly public manner. If he puts it at the top of the agenda of the next meeting of regional leaders in March, expect a major freakout in Washington. The U.S. news media, almost totally fixated on the machinations of a pack of Republican losers and the corrupt U.S. presidential race, has so far ignored these loud knocking sounds on our southern door.

It is not unlikely that the U.S. will soon find itself without allies in the war on drugs and thus be compelled to adopt a wholly new approach.

[Rag Blog contributor David P. Hamilton has been a political activist in Austin since the late 1960s when he worked with SDS and wrote for The Rag, Austin’s underground newspaper. Read more articles by David P. Hamilton on The Rag Blog.]

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Richard Raznikov : The Privatization of Everything

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Gobbling up the Commons. Cartoon by Ahmed Abdallah / 3arabawy.

On the verge:
The privatization of everything

Does anyone have to ask what happens to law enforcement and the judicial system once the state agrees to keep private prisons at 90% of capacity?

By Richard Raznikov | The Rag Blog | March 1, 2012

No society can aspire to democracy unless it maintains an unbreakable connection between its politics and its police powers.

Once the populace has no political access to policy and enforcement, once those with coercive power over others are not directly accountable to the people’s representatives, you can kiss your ass goodbye.

We’re on the verge of it in America, 2012.

As David Foster Wallace remarked, the truth will set you free but not until it’s finished with you.

All across the western world, there is enormous pressure being brought to “privatize” everything. Where does this pressure come from? On whose behalf? What does it mean? What is the connection between the demands for “privatization” in Greece, as part of an “austerity package” initiated by the International Monetary Fund, with the “privatization” of prisons in Florida and other states of the U.S.? Is there one?

Let’s begin with this thought: as human cultures have evolved, there has been a general agreement that some things on the planet, such as water and air, belong to everyone. Democratization has extended these rights to include access to natural beauty and to the oceans.

With various forms of democracy, even including communism and socialism, have come the acceptance that matters of common concern, however approached or regulated, are integrally connected to the political system. That is a fundamental good, since without it there is no way for the people to exercise any real power over their political environment.

If one subscribes, therefore, to democracy, one also must take with it an inviolable connection between, for example, the building of roads, and politics. Otherwise, should roads be privately built, no one could pass without paying extortionate fees. Farmers could not get their crops to market. People could not travel or visit one another. And so forth.

Severing the connection between the public and the management of and control over public resources and operations thought to be of the commons, is dangerous. It would be hard to exaggerate just how dangerous.

The issue of privatization is maybe the most important public issue we’re facing in the U.S., and it’s causing terrible dislocation and political chaos in Europe, as well. You’re not going to see it on the news (sic). As with many things in America now, this is a story we’ll have to piece together on our own.

The Corrections Corporation of America, largest company operating private prisons, has written to 48 states offering to take over the running of prisons, provided that the states guarantee a 90 percent occupancy.

The systemic corruption this invites is breathtaking.

The care of inmates is of course a responsibility of the prison systems in the states and in the country as a whole for federal institutions. How we treat inmates, provision for their food and clothing, their recreation, their activities, their health, this is a matter of public policy. The state arrests, tries, and attains convictions; inmates have been sentenced to prison. The duration of the sentence is often impacted by the behavior of the prisoner.

It should be obvious that prison conditions are subject to politics; it is politics which passes the laws and operates the judicial system. How prisons are run is our public responsibility, and this is subject to our laws.

Prisons are not meant to be, nor should they be, profit-making enterprises. They have functions to fulfill. That’s not to say that budget matters are unimportant, only that they cannot be the sole criterion for proper operation.

Otherwise, inmates would be given no services at all. Rice is cheap; rancid meat is really cheap. There would be no point worrying about rehabilitation, which can be expensive. Nobody cares what happens when they get out. Gulags give you a profit margin that would impress even Wall Street.

Government is not supposed to be a profit-making enterprise. But any governmental function, once privatized, becomes exactly that. Does anyone have to ask what happens to law enforcement and the judicial system once the state agrees to keep private prisons at 90% of capacity?

How will the national parks be run when we privatize them, as some idiot politicians are advocating? What will the nation’s coastlines be like? Years ago, California voters approved the Coastal Initiative which protected it and secured public access; if and when that promise is broken, how long before only the wealthy can enjoy the beach?

On a lighter note, how about privatizing the military? It’s being done, you know. When Obama announced the “withdrawal” of U.S. troops from Iraq he’d promised only three years before, he didn’t bother to mention that remaining behind are an estimated 50,000 private troops, a private army serving the needs of the corporate mobsters who are figuring to loot what’s left.

Xe, nee Blackwater, is a private army the government contracts with to perform certain tasks, often unspecified, which it feels the regular army cannot perform. Its soldiers are paid much more than GIs, and the casualty rate is much higher. Xe works for the U.S. or for Halliburton or Bechtel or whomever hires it. It is, as we discovered when Blackwater mercenaries murdered Iraqi civilians for pure sport, exempt from U.S. law and the control of the American government which hired it.

When private armies can operate outside the political control of a country, there is no democracy, even in form. We all know what it is, don’t we?

Privatization of water, which I wrote about recently (“As Benign as Lucifer“), has enabled major corporations to destroy wide swaths of agriculture in India and elsewhere, causing widespread suicide as farmers by the tens of thousands have lost their land. Privatization of public services, public properties, public responsibilities, is a one-way ticket to hell.

The riots in Greece are about privatization. That is the agenda of the International Monetary Fund, the consortium of bankers who run a large part of the world and want more. Through the mechanism of manufactured debt, the bankers are able to extort whatever “austerity” measures they want. These involve a reduction in the wages of public employees, a reduction in social services for the poor, and the privatization of what is publicly owned.

If you think we’re not headed in that direction in the United States, you’re dreaming. That’s what the budget arguments are about now, and the talk of America’s “debt.” To whom is that “debt” owed? Why, to the bankers, of course, the same people whose looting of the Treasury caused this crisis in the first place. Pretty neat, huh?

Having taken everything else, they are going after what’s left, and what’s left are the treasures of a nation, the wealth owned in common by its people.

We simply can’t let them get it.

[Rag Blog contributor Richard Raznikov is an attorney practicing in San Rafael, California. He blogs at News from a Parallel World. Find more articles by Richard Raznikov on The Rag Blog.]

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Jack A. Smith : Will Israel Bomb Iran?

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Will Israel strike? Image from Gestetner Updates.

Bombing Iran:
Will they or won’t they?

Iran insists it is not producing or about to produce nuclear weapons… Israel is known to possess at least 200 nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

By Jack A. Smith | The Rag Blog | March 1, 2012

What’s the Obama Administration’s latest position on the possibility of an attack on Iran? It seems to be in flux but the White House is reported to be urging Israel not to start a war before the November elections.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says there is a “strong possibility” that Israel will attack Iran in either April, May, or June. The purpose would be to destroy Iran’s alleged building of a nuclear weapon, an assertion Tehran rejects, pointing to strong support for its position from authoritative American sources.

Commenting on Panetta’s report, a February 25 Associated Press dispatch declared: “An Israeli pre-emptive attack on Iran’s nuclear sites could draw the U.S. into a new Middle East conflict, a prospect dreaded by a war-weary Pentagon wary of new entanglements… with unpredictable outcomes.”

Foreign policy theorist Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter with links to the Obama White House, told CNN Feb. 24 that if Israel attacks Iraq, “it will be disastrous for us in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in the terms of oil, but also in the Middle East more generally.”

On February 28, the AP reported that “Israeli officials say they won’t warn the U.S. if they decide to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.”

The U.S. is in daily communication with Israel about the matter. President Barack Obama is scheduled to hold discussions with warhawk Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on March 5.

In the midst of this gathering war talk there are indications Washington does not want Israel to start a war at this juncture for several reasons:

  • The Obama Administration believes bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities will cause far more problems than it solves, and that the more effective policy is composed of sanctions, spying, and subversion, leading to regime change if possible.

  • Washington is hesitant to get any deeper into a potential Iran quagmire at a time when Afghanistan is blowing up in its face, and while the U.S. is involved behind the scenes in ousting the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus.

  • The White House does not want a new war on its hands during the last few months of an election campaign. The Wall Steet Journal online pointed out February 28 that “Iran and its nuclear intentions are rapidly emerging as the ultimate wild card in this year’s presidential race.”

In any event, President Obama and the entire U.S. national security bureaucracy know very well that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.

The New York Times published a relatively sensational front page article February 25 about Iran and the bomb that was based largely on authoritative information clearing Iran of bomb-making charges.

These facts have been publicly available for five years, but because the Bush and Obama Administrations sought to minimize the significance of the bombshell reports most Americans knew little of their importance

The Times‘ headline read: “U.S. Agencies See No Move by Iran to Build a Bomb.” The article disclosed:

American intelligence analysts continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb. Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.

The article also reported on some unusually honest statements made in the last few weeks by Obama Administration officials:

In Senate testimony on Jan. 31, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, stated explicitly that American officials believe that Iran is preserving its options for a nuclear weapon, but said there was no evidence that it had made a decision on making a concerted push to build a weapon. David H. Petraeus, the C.I.A. director, concurred with that view at the same hearing. Other senior United States officials, including Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have made similar statements in recent television appearances.

The fact that the Times decided to publish a front page article based on largely dated information undermining the rationale for attacking Iran evidently means the ruling elite is leaning on the White House to avoid one more war that could backfire during the election campaign.

Published in the same issue of the Times was a new statement from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran is producing additional enriched uranium inside a deep underground site — a report that the right wing Netanyahu regime distorted to signify that Iran is one step closer to creating a weapon with which to threaten the existence of Israel.

There was no proof the uranium in question was intended for any purpose other than Iran’s civilian nuclear program. Iran is working with the UN on an agreement to allow inspectors into all sites associated with the program.

Given the immense U.S. and Israeli spying apparatus inside Iran, as well as America’s extensive surveillance abilities — from spy satellites to drone flights and probable access to every telephone call and Internet message in Iran — it is significant no evidence has been collected to verify the bomb-making accusations. The 16 American intelligence agencies seem to know what they are talking about.

This does not impress war hawks in the U.S. Congress and among anti-Iranian organizations, such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, who are working to push Washington toward greater confrontations with Tehran. Several right wing senators introduced a bill in mid-February lowering the threshold for a U.S. or Israeli strike against Iran from making a bomb to possessing the ability to do so.

Iran insists it is not producing or about to produce nuclear weapons, and maintains that its nuclear power program is essentially in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel is known to possess at least 200 nuclear weapons and delivery systems while ignoring the treaty.

Tehran has long called for transforming the Middle East into a nuclear-free zone — a proposition opposed by both Obama and Netanyahu. Ironically, Washington is on exceptionally close terms with the three countries in possession of large nuclear arsenals that have thumbed their noses at the NonProliferation Treaty — Israel, Pakistan and India — even to the point of assisting them to maintain and update their weaponry.

In a statement February 28, Iranian Foreign Minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, declared that “We do not see any glory, pride or power in the nuclear weapons; quite the opposite.” He then referred to a religious decree issued by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme authority within the Islamic Republic of Iran, that termed “the production possession, use or threat of use of nuclear weapons are illegitimate, futile, harmful, dangerous and prohibited as a great sin.”

United States animosity toward Iran — which has existed since America’s puppet monarch in Tehran was overthrown over 30 years ago — has nothing to do with Tehran’s alleged efforts to construct nuclear weapons. It is instead primarily based on Washington’s intention to exercise unimpeded domination of the Persian Gulf region, in which perhaps 30% of the world’s petroleum originates and is transported through the Gulf.

America has sought hegemony over the Middle East, and particularly the Persian Gulf, for several decades. This goal was a principle reason President George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq in 2003 to solidify U.S. control of the Gulf, believing a quick victory would pave the way toward toppling the government in Iran.

The Iraqi fightback and the subsequent stalemate destroyed Bush’s plans. Since Baghdad had long been Tehran’s main enemy, the only country to benefit from Bush’s neoconservative folly in Iraq was Iran.

Iran is now the principal power within the Persian Gulf region. Tehran has had a sharp rhetorical critique of the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia for decades but is not using its power to threaten or attack any other country. Tehran’s military is not large, and is defensive in structure and intention.

But as long as the Islamic Republic refuses to subordinate itself to imperial Washington it remains an obstacle to America’s geopolitical ambitions, which are based on retaining global hegemony.

A main reason for the Obama Administration’s cruel and ever-tightening economic sanctions is to bring about regime-change in Iran to situate a client administration in Tehran. If this doesn’t work, the threat of military action is obviously implicit in President Obama’s mantra about “No option is off the table.”

For the immediate future, however, the White House appears to prefer sanctions, spying, and subversion to the potential unintended consequences of a U.S. or Israeli bombing attack on Iran.

[Jack A. Smith was editor of the Guardian — for decades the nation’s preeminent leftist newsweekly — that closed shop in 1992. Smith now edits the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter, where this article was also posted. Read more articles by Jack A. Smith on The Rag Blog.]

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Rag Radio : The Occupy Movement and Activism in Austin

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Occupy activists in the studios of KOOP-FM, Austin, February 24, 2012. From left, Richard Bowden, Joe Cooper, Mo McMorrow, Nate Cowan, Brian J. Overman, Lucian Villaseñor, and Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer. Photo by Tracey Schulz / Rag Radio.

Rag Radio:
Representatives of the Occupy movement
discuss activist projects in Austin

By Rag Radio | The Rag Blog | February 29, 2012

A group of Austin activists discussed the Occupy Austin movement with host Thorne Dreyer on Rag Radio last Friday, February 24, 2012.
Listen to the show here.

Representatives of the Occupy Austin Movement on
Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer, Friday, Feb. 24, 2012


They talked about Occupy Austin, and plans for Occupy Southby — a series of events, including the Million Musicians March for Peace, a yearly Austin tradition — scheduled to occur during the massive South by Southwest music, film, and interactive festival, March 9-March 18, 2012.

Representatives of Occupy UT discussed the movement on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, including plans for a Teach-In and other events scheduled for Thursday, March 1, on the UT campus. And the group also included representatives of the Legion Co-Op Coffeehouse, a soon-to-open worker-owned coffeehouse that grew out of the occupy movement in Austin.

The guests included Richard Bowden, an Austin fiddler extraordinaire, long-time peace activist, and primary organizer of the Million Musicians March for Peace, Austin’s unique, musician-led, annual community peace event. Joining Bowden on the show was Austin-based singer-songwriter Mo McMorrow, who has also worked as a visual artist, actress, and stand-up comic. McMorrow and Bowden performed live during the show.

Others on the program included Joe Cooper, who has been involved in Occupy Austin since the first planning meeting in September 2011, and was present almost daily during the four months of the 24/7 occupation; and Lucian Villaseñor, a student in Mexican-American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and an intern with the Workers Defense Project, who is a primary organizer of Occupy UT.

Also, Nate Cowan, an organizer of the worker-owned Legion Co-Op Coffeehouse, who has been a peace activist since high school, where he started Youth Activists of Austin to fight military recruiting in schools, and who has worked full-time with Occupy Austin; and Brian J. Overman, a writer and video producer, who is also an Occupy Austin activist and a developer of the cooperative coffeehouse which organizers envision as both a “sustainable economic model and a safe space for local activists.”

This episode of Rag Radio was produced during the spring membership drive of KOOP 91-7-FM, Austin’s cooperatively-run community radio station; fundraising pitches, underwriting announcements, and recorded music have not been edited out of the podcast.

Image from *eddie’s photostream / Flickr.

Rag Radio, which has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history.

Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP and streamed live on the web. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Tracey Schulz is the show’s engineer and co-producer.

Coming up on Rag Radio:

March 2, 2012: Music writer Margaret Moser and screen actor Sonny Carl Davis on the movie, Roadie, the Austin Music Awards, and SXSW.

March 9, 2012: Singer-songwriter & author Bobby Bridger on the lasting impact of Native-American culture on American society.
March 16, 2012: Journalist and labor activist David Bacon on how U.S. policies fueled Mexico’s great migration.

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Harry Targ : Social Movements and the Forces of Reaction

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from KXL.com.

Progressive social movements and
the reactionary forces that oppose them

By Harry Targ | The Rag Blog | February 29, 2012

“Of course, Big Labor’s coercion of employees into paying union dues to subsidize its political agenda isn’t new, since this practice is as old as the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). But with AFL-CIO president John Sweeney beating his chest about the Federation’s political spending, the coercion of workers to fund the AFL-CIO’s political operations became news.” — National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, Inc, September 9, 1997

“A source with direct knowledge of decision-making at Komen’s headquarters in Dallas said the grant-making criteria were adopted with the deliberate intention of targeting Planned Parenthood. The criteria’s impact on Planned Parenthood and its status as the focus of government investigations were highlighted in a memo distributed to Komen affiliates in December.” — Associated Press, February 7, 2012

“WHEREAS, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was founded in 1970 with the mission of increasing voter participation, delivering services to inner-city neighborhoods, community organizing, and carrying out issue campaigns; (followed by a list of financial and other transgressions)

THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that ALEC calls on all states to immediately end support for ACORN and groups linked to ACORN.” — From the website of the American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC)

Academics define social movements in different ways and believe they arise for a variety of reasons. They can come from groups that already exist, a growing availability of resources, the rise of crises of one sort or another, and/or from specific issues.

Such movements may take a long time to gestate and grow, or emerge in moments of spontaneity, sometimes rising from inspirational examples. Often they have their roots in the need to react to powerful and negative initiatives by opposing political or economic groups.

The forces of reaction may have as their project immediate efforts to destroy existing rights or prerogatives embedded in public policies. In addition they may see in the policies and groups they oppose the seeds of new ideas that could lead to fundamental social changes that must be challenged.

While reactionary forces may arise to oppose specific changes in policy, their most important legacy is the long-term efforts they employ to crush organizations of people that could see the need for fundamental social change. Therefore, as in the cases of labor, women’s rights, and people’s movements, reactionary forces are fundamentally committed to long-term organizing, rolling back the very forces that have provided some services to those not part of the ruling class.

We can see examples of the rise of social movements out of reactionary programs in the recent battles over “Right-to-Work for less” legislation in the state of Indiana and the spreading campaigns to bring similar legislation to states throughout the industrial heartland. Right-to-Work campaigns have followed on efforts to diminish worker power to destroy rights of public employees to organize and to make difficult worker organizing in any venue.

The data comparing the conditions of workers in Right-to-Work states with others clearly shows that the former experience lower wages, health benefits, ashop-floor safety, and their families fewer rights to health care and retirement security.

More generally, in a thorough recent report on the role of unions in American life, the authors of a Center for American Progress Action Fund study (David Madland and Nick Bunker) point out that virtually every positive social change in the United States has received strong support from organized labor. Historically, during periods of high union density (high percentages of workers in unions), all American workers have benefited in terms of wages, benefits, and workplace rights.

In addition, organized labor has been among the strongest institutional supporters of the Democratic Party, and on occasion, some trade unionists have supported progressive third party campaigns (from the Henry Wallace campaign for president in 1948 to Green Party campaigns by candidate Ralph Nader).

Further, the existence of a vibrant labor movement is vital for workers everywhere. Those who oppose organized labor, such as the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation quoted above, do so for reasons of short term gain. Right-to-Work laws may weaken unions, lead to declining wages, and create larger profits.

But more important, destroying the labor movement and the very idea that workers have rights and those rights have the potential of being realized in strong organizations of their making seems vital to economic and political elites who are always striving to create a society dominated even more by industrial and finance capital.

Trade unions, while driven by the defense of basic interests today, imply the possibility of creating a society that privileges worker rights and democracy. From the standpoint of big capital, this remains the ultimate danger that must be stamped out.

Just as trade unions embody the possibility of real democracy for workers, women’s rights to make choices about their own bodies constitute the same kind of immediate and long-term reality. The signature target of the reactionary right is Planned Parenthood of America. Planned Parenthood provides a broad array of reproductive health services for women, particularly poor women. Only a small percentage of their resources are allocated for abortions.

In addition the mission of Planned Parenthood is to create the conditions in which each individual can manage his/her own fertility, what they refer to as “reproductive self-determination.” To achieve this goal Planned Parenthood works to provide reproductive and comprehensive health care, including advocating public policies to achieve the mission.

Reactionary forces, from the American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC) to various national anti-abortion groups, and most recently Susan Komen for the Cure (ostensibly apolitical) have mobilized not only to shrink Planned Parenthood services to women but to eliminate the organization itself.

For some, abortion is anathema for theological reasons. But for most, Planned Parenthood represents institutionally the basic rights of women to control their own bodies and by implication the provision of accessible and comprehensive health care.

The rising of the poor, women and men, black and white, employed and unemployed, the young and old, constitutes another fundamental challenge to the economic and political power of reactionary forces in America.

Organizations such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), until it was destroyed by an orchestrated campaign of lies in 2010, received public funding to support programs for low and moderate income families. It promoted voter registration in communities, and advocated for health care reform, public housing, and living wage legislation.

From the vantage point of economic and political elites, power and privilege could be challenged in cities and towns across America if community organizations such as ACORN developed programs of action and service.

These three organizations together represent labor, women, and grassroots poor people’s campaigns. They are the embodiment of popular forces which seek to end exploitation, sexism, and racism. Implicitly they stand for the construction of a different kind of society in which these pathologies do not exist.

That is why all three — organized labor, Planned Parenthood, and ACORN — have been and continue to be under assault. And that is why progressive campaigns need to be organized around the fundamental connections between class, gender, and race and to defend labor, women’s, and community organizations.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical — and that’s also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ’s articles on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Robert Jensen : Belén Fernández Dresses Down Thomas Friedman

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer


The emperor’s messenger has no clothes:
Belén Fernández dresses down Thomas Friedman

By Robert Jensen / Truthout / January 28, 2012

[The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, by Belén Fernández (Verso, 2011); 240 pp., $16.95. Published by Verso in its new series Counterblasts, dedicated to “challenging the apologists of Empire and Capital.”]

What’s scary about Thomas Friedman is not his journalism, with its under-inflated insights and twisted metaphors. Annoying as his second-rate thinking and third-rate writing may be, he’s not the first — or the worst — hack journalist.

What should unnerve us about Friedman is the acclaim he receives in political and professional circles. Friedman’s New York Times column appears twice a week on the most prestigious op/ed page in the United States; he has won three Pulitzer Prizes; his books are best-sellers; he’s a darling of the producers of television news shows; and he fills lecture halls for a speaking fee as high as $75,000.

Although his work is stunningly shallow and narcissistic, Friedman is celebrated as a big thinker.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews was so excited after a 2005 “Hardball” interview with Friedman that he proclaimed: “You have a global brain, my friend. You’re amazing. You amaze me every time you write a book.”

How does a journalist with a track record of bad predictions and a penchant for superficial analysis — a person paid to reflect about the world yet who seems to lack the capacity for critical self-reflection — end up being treated as an oracle?

The answer is simple: Friedman tells the privileged, and those who aspire to privilege, what they want to hear in a way that makes them feel smart; his trumpeting of U.S. affluence and power is sprinkled with pithy-though-empty anecdotes, padded with glib turns of phrases.

He’s the perfect oracle for a management-focused, advertising-saturated, dumbed-down imperial culture that doesn’t want to come to terms with the systemic and structural reasons for its decline. In Friedman’s world, we’re always one clichéd big idea away from the grand plan that will allow us to continue to pretend to be the shining city upon the hill that we have always imagined we were/are/will be again.

As a reporter, columnist, author, or speaker, Friedman’s secret to success is in avoiding the journalistic ideals of “speaking truth to power” or “afflicting the comfortable.” Those ideals are too rarely met in mainstream journalism, but Friedman never goes very far beyond parroting the powerful and comforting the comfortable.

Friedman sees the world from the point of view of the privileged, adopting in his own words the view of “a tourist with an attitude” when reporting on the rest of the world.

Here’s the problem with that mindset: Around the world, American tourists routinely are experienced as boorish and smug. Around the world, people smile at American tourists and take their money, all the while despising their arrogance and ignorance. Tourists never quite catch on, wondering why the “natives” don’t appreciate them.

In her examination of Friedman’s work, Belén Fernández explains the danger in America’s affection for its number one Tourist Journalist. Her book, The Imperial Messenger, is as much about the cultural and political crises in the United States as it is about Friedman’s flaws. This larger focus transforms what could have been a sarcastic hit-piece that took easy shots at Friedman’s most mangled prose into a thoughtful meditation from a young journalist willing to state the obvious: the emperor’s messenger has no clothes.

After graduating from Columbia University with a political science degree in 2003, Fernández traveled throughout the Middle East, Latin America, and Europe. Eventually her travel notes turned into journalism, as her accounts of people she met and interviewed became stories for web publications.

Frustrated by the gap between what she knew from her education and reporting, and Friedman’s version of international affairs, she wrote a few short critiques of the Times columnist in 2009. Then she undertook the systematic review of all his columns since 1995, selections from his writing as a reporter, and his books that led to The Imperial Messenger. In an email interview, she explained how that happened and why.


Robert Jensen: What sparks a relatively unknown journalist with no establishment credentials to research a book that argues one of the country’s most well-known journalists is, to put it bluntly, a fool and a fraud? That isn’t going to put you in the fast lane for a well-paying job in mainstream journalism.

Belén Fernández: Prior to 2009, my familiarity with the work of Thomas Friedman was basically limited to his notion that France should have been removed from the U.N. Security Council for refusing to support the Iraq war.

When I began reading him more extensively, I couldn’t believe that no one had debunked him in book form and took it upon myself to do so — naively assuming that it would be an enjoyable and relatively simple task. This assumption proved unfounded, as I realized that a book of any real value had to consist of something more serious than 150 pages of making fun of Friedman’s blunders and general foolishness.

What kept me going throughout the months of reading and re-reading decades worth of Friedman’s drivel was anger — at his warmongering jingoism, his blatant racism vis-à-vis large sectors of the world’s population, and the fact that someone unable to keep track of his own arguments and to refrain from continually contradicting himself had risen to a position of such prominence in the U.S. media.

What word or phrase would you use to describe Friedman’s analytical framework, his way of understanding the world?

Perhaps Friedman’s own decree: “Many big bad things happen in the world without America, but not a lot of big good things.”

Good journalists inevitably have to simplify the complex events they report about. You suggest Friedman’s work is reductionist. What’s the difference between the two?

It’s one thing to simplify events and phenomena so that audiences can more easily understand them; it’s quite another to brand Palestinians as “gripped by a collective madness” and to whitewash war crimes such as collective punishment.

Recall Friedman’s justification [on the Charlie Rose Show] in 2003 for the Iraq war: A “terrorism bubble” had emerged in “that part of the world” and had made itself known on 9/11. In order to burst the bubble, U.S. troops needed to go “house to house, from Basra to Baghdad,” wielding a “very big stick” and instructing Iraqis to “Suck. On. This.” No matter that Friedman himself acknowledged that there was absolutely no link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Or recall Friedman’s reductionist Tilt Theory of History, which applies to situations in which “you take a country, a culture, or a region that has been tilted in the wrong direction and tilt it in the right direction.” Again, “right” and “wrong” as conceived of by Friedman and the U.S. military are passed off as universal truths.

Then we of course have the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, which posits that no two countries that host McDonald’s establishments have gone to war with each other since each acquired its McDonald’s. This delightful discovery regarding the harmonious effects of American fast food and U.S. corporate dominance is cast into doubt when, shortly after the theory’s birth, 19 McDonald’s-possessing NATO countries go to war with McDonald’s-possessing Yugoslavia.

Around this same time, Friedman’s reductionist assessment that “America truly is the ultimate benign hegemon” is contradicted by such things as his simultaneous entreaties for “sustained,” “unreasonable,” and “less than surgical bombing” of Serbia.

His economic reductions meanwhile rarely withstand the test of reality. Friedman exulted over the Irish economic model in 2005, threatening Germany and France that they had better follow the “leprechaun way” — by, inter alia, making it easier to fire workers — in order to avert economic decadence. The leprechaun way merits no further mention following the collapse of the Irish economy.

Friedman seems to defy easy political categorization. He doesn’t fit into the categories of liberal or conservative typically used in mainstream politics in the United States. What word or phrase would you use to sum up Friedman’s politics?

Schizophrenic? For example, he advertised the Iraq war as “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched” while simultaneously defining himself as “a liberal on every issue other than this war” and the war as part of a “neocon strategy.” During an encounter with Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit in 2003, Friedman described the alleged war for democracy in Iraq as not a war that the American masses demanded but rather a war of an elite.

Friedman’s consistent championing of policies benefiting the corporate elite — most recently in his campaign to slash corporate taxes and entitlements in the aftermath of the financial recession — would locate him on the right of the ideological spectrum, though he intermittently endeavors to disguise himself as a “Social Safety Netter” or a “radical centrist.”

According to Friedman, the current key to establishing a “party of the radical center” is a bizarre entity called Americans Elect, which will field a third presidential ticket in 2012 elected via “internet convention” and which Friedman acknowledges is funded with “some serious hedge-fund money” courtesy of investor Peter Ackerman. Centrism indeed.

At a presentation at a university in Istanbul in 2010, Friedman classified himself politically as neither a Democrat nor a Republican but rather a disciple of billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s theory that “everything I got in life was because I was born in this country, America, at this time, with these opportunities and these institutions.” Friedman reiterated his duty to pass on a similar situation to his children.

As I say in my book, foreign audiences and non-billionaires might be forgiven for a lack of complete sympathy.

You decided to focus on three subjects in the book: “America,” “the Arab/Muslim world,” and the United States’ “special relationship” with Israel. Why did you pick those?

No book on Friedman would have been complete without a section on his grating patriotic obsession with the United States and his view of the country as a global role model and civilizing force. Given that the Arab/Muslim world is so often on the receiving end of the U.S. military’s civilizing endeavors, I decided it was also crucial to devote a section to Friedman’s unabashed Orientalism and his dehumanizing and patronizing contempt for Arabs and Muslims, which he naturally attempts to disguise as concern for their freedom.

The “special relationship” with Israel is more a reference to Friedman’s own function as an apologist for crimes committed by the Jewish state. He purports to be a serious critic of Israel, but his criticism is largely restricted to the issue of settlements, which he criticizes because he views them as jeopardizing the perpetuation of ethnocracy and Israel’s ability to continue denying Palestinians equal rights in a single multi-ethnic democracy.

Right-wing Zionists are increasingly condemning Friedman as anti-Israeli and a pro-Palestinian militant, which raises a question — with enemies like Friedman, who needs friends?

Your own political views are clearly at odds with Friedman’s. How would you answer critics who might suggest your book is just a polemic about those issues, not about Friedman?

One of the most fundamental problems I have with Friedman is that he uses his elevated position to belittle human suffering and to encourage the slaughter of civilians, as he did during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza (2008-09), when he invoked Israel’s “logical” mass targeting of civilians in Lebanon in 2006 as an optimistic precedent.

I don’t think it’s possible to reduce this to a clash between political views. As I point out in the book, it is not up to Friedman to decide that the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibiting collective punishment and targeting of civilians in wartime is illogical.

Given his influential position in foreign policy circles, I don’t classify his promotion of the notion that some human beings are inherently inferior and more expendable than others, and that corporate profit supersedes human life in importance, as merely politically misguided. I classify it as criminal, and I consider him to be personally responsible and not just a product of the system in which he flourishes.

After this rather unorthodox start to your publishing career, what comes next?

For the moment my plan is to travel to Peru and Bolivia and see what happens, and hopefully to not encounter anyone who has ever heard of Thomas Friedman.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses in media law, ethics, and politics — and a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. His books include All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. This article was first published at Truthout. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : Disenfranchising Black Voters in Texas, 1890-1920

Posted on February 28, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Poll Tax Receipt, January 30, 1908; digital image from the University of North Texas Libraries.

The hidden history of Texas

Part IX: 1890-1920/3 — Disenfranchising black voters in Texas

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / February 28, 2012

[This is the third section of Part 9 of Bob Feldman’s Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

Between 1900 and 1910, in an effort to make it more difficult for dissatisfied African-American and poor white small farmers in Texas to express their discontent and their desire for radical democratic political and economic change, politicians intensified their efforts to more permanently disenfranchise African-American voters in the state and to create a poll tax in Texas.

As Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans recalled:

White efforts to disenfranchise Negroes also stimulated the decline in the number of black voters by 1906. Negroes formed majorities in 14 counties along the coast, in the Brazos River Valley, and in Northeast Texas . They constituted 40 to 50 percent of the population in 13 other East Texas counties. Black majorities on the local level often elected Negroes to positions such as alderman, county commissioner, justice of the peace, county treasurer, tax assessor, and constable…

The white primary… spread rapidly across East Texas in the late 1890s and early 1900s…The state Democratic executive committee in 1904 suggested white primaries to all county committees which generally accepted the idea… The legislature in 1902 passed a constitutional amendment allowing a poll tax for voting. Populists, Mexican-Americans, labor unions, and some Anglo papers opposed it… The amendment passed by 2 to 1 margin, with the support of most whites…

According to Merline Pitre’s In Struggle Against Jim Crow, “the Terrell Election Bills… in 1902, 1903, and 1905, respectively… provided for a poll tax requirement for voting, a first and second primary, and a voter declaration of party membership…”

And “the Terrell Election Bill of 1905, designed to disenfranchise blacks, laid the foundation for the white Democratic primary by giving the party’s executive committee the right to determine eligibility for party membership and by making it a misdemeanor to pay poll taxes for blacks.”

According to Black Texans, “the decline in Negro voter participation from about 100,000 in the 1890’s to approximately 5,000 in 1906 suggests the effectiveness of the white primary, the poll tax, and the `lily white’ thrust in the Republic party” — in which “division between black leaders and white control of federal patronage” had, by 1906, also “opened the way to increasing white dominance of the Republican party” in Texas, as “`lily whites’ returned to the fold” of the Texas GOP.

According to the book, “the poll tax, the Democratic white primary, and white Republican leaders combined to keep most black Texans outside the political arena and to allow little voice to those who entered it from 1904 to 1944.”

In 1900, 63 percent of employed African-Americans in Texas still “continued to labor at various forms of agriculture” and “landowners formed 31 percent of the Negro farmers, with 69 percent sharecroppers and tenants — compared to 50 percent among white farmers,” according to Black Texans.

The same book also recalled that, in 1900, 28 percent of all employed African-Americans in Texas worked as “servants, laundresses, nurses and mid-wives, restaurant and saloon keepers, hair dressers, and barbers,” and that “by 1900 no major city” in Texas yet “claimed more than six Negro doctors,” although there were then still 23 African-American-owned weekly newspapers in Texas at that time.

And not surprisingly, given the increasing level of institutionalized and legalized white supremacy and racism that developed in Texas between 1890 and 1920, “the vast majority of Negroes in Texas found it impossible to overcome a combination of economic and racial problems which kept them at the level of sharecropping and unskilled labor as the 20th century began.”

“Black people who had been at least voters and laborers in the post-Reconstruction period found themselves virtual outsiders in Texas society of the early 20th century,” according to Black Texans.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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