The Rag Blog

Ambassador Gerald B. Helman writes:

There are continuing reports, seemingly based upon authoritative backgrounding out of Baghdad and Washington, suggesting that variations on a “Plan B” are being developed. While support continues to be voiced for the current “surge”, doubt is beginning to be expressed even by military and White House officials that a confident evaluation of the surge is unlikely by the promised deadline of September. It may take longer, perhaps to the end of the year. General Odierno was quite forceful in insisting that a serious evaluation cannot be made until January.

From the military point of view, the surge is evidently not producing the desired results of improving security in Baghdad, and is unlikely to do so under current plans and force levels. After an initial slight lull, the level of violence is back up to pre-surge levels, and then some in the case of US deaths. The political component of the surge, the overriding importance of which has been underscored by General Petraeus, is also stalled. It has failed to bring about any significant reonciliation between contending Iraqi factions nor has it led to progress on key legislation, the adoption of which is supposed to lead to a more stable political environment.

For domestic political consumption, the White House seems to be addressing all of this, at least for now, through its familiar tactics of pushing out the time when success can be expected (originally it was six months from the initiation of the surge, then September sometime) and dampening expectations by predicting the obvious–increased US casualties. In other words, things will get worse before they get better.

Meanwhile, work on a Plan B continues, with the options apparently ranging from elements of the Iraq Study Group Report (reduce US forces, concentrate on training the Iraqi army and force protection and continuing interdiction of al Qaeda) to variations on partition. Most recently, the President and others have suggested establishing a long-term US military base presence in Iraq to provide local and regional stability, citing as an example the continuing US military presence in Korea. (This example is so inept historically and strategically as to cast further doubt on the competence and and strategic objectives of the Administration.) Presumably the bases are the three huge installations the Pentagon built a while ago with permanancy in mind.

Much of the Plan B planning, as reported, seems to be the product of wishful thinking about the current situation today in Iraq and what realistic options might exist in the 6 months ahead, and beyond leading to U.S. elections. To this observor, given the history of our performance in Iraq, any new plan must be subjected to early and very critical evaluation.

Politically, Iraq today is a failed state. Its writ runs only through part of the Green Zone. It cannot control the use of force domestically nor can it protect its frontiers. Its continuing existance depends upon the US. The US is the occupying power and provides significant financing and what little security exists outside the Green Zone. Baghdad and the rest of the country are under the control of warring factions and militias. Corruption is endemic and overwelming. The loyalties of the police and army are as suspect as their professional competence. How will any plan B change that? How will the existance of large, permanent US bases in Iraq help the present Government expand its authority and gain legitimacy?

Militarily, it is important to project what might happen if, in six months, the US implements a Plan B whose principal elements consist of a troop drawdown to 100,000 in 2008, dedicated to Iraqi army training, force protection and al Qaeda interdiction. But is there any reason to hope that in six months’ time the Iraqi army will stand tall and demonstrate the competence that the surge was designed to showcase? That the police will be anything other than hopeless? That their loyalties will be directed to their elected government? None of this is very likely, in which case what happens to the US presence in the Green Zone and, indeed, to the Iraqi government that is pretty much confined to the Green Zone? What reason is there to think that a new training regimen, presumably with embedded US trainers (who will be very vulnerable), will be any more successful than what has passed for training during much of the last four years. Will it really take large numbers of US troops in three permanent bases to to chase down 1-2,000 El Qaeda? Should it really be the job of the US to defend Iraq against foreign invasions? And who is about to invade (except for maybe the Turks to punish the Kurds)?

To this obeserver, there is nothing in the suggested Plan B, even if in part based on the Iraq Study Group Report, that would recommend it as an alternative to an announced, scheduled withdrawal from Iraq, that could also incorporate the elements of the Study Group report. Such a schedule would have the virtue of forcing the contending factions in Iraq, and Iraq’s neighbors, to face up to their responsibilities to find a political accommodation, or to face the consequences of their (and our) failures. This is not rocket science; it’s hardball politics in which the US is just one of the pawns that various Iraqi factions are trying to manipulate.

But there remains the question of the permanent bases, a concept now being floated by the Administration but one which must have been in the minds of the White House and our military planners from the time when these massive installations were first projected. Congress should probe this one very carefully and insist that the Administration’s plans should be on the public record. Whatever their purposes, and certainly there has been little candor on the part of the Administration as to what these are, the bases will never be accepted either by the Iraqi people, of whatever faction (except the Kurds). It will violate every concept of independence, national pride and Arab identity that have been the hallmarks of the post-colonial period. Any Iraqi government that supported it would not only fail, but would be despised. Such bases might have the dubious benefit of uniting all Iraqis in opposition. Only a US Administration that expected to be greeted with flowers by the Iraqis could convince itself that those same Iraqis will tolerate such bases and that such bases could survive in hostile territory, with long and endangered supply lines.

Not to be forgotten is that a delay in evaluating the surge, much less the kind of Plan B that seems to be emerging, will impact the domestic political process. There is restiveness in the Republican ranks. The polls are clear that a growing majorirty of Americans want out. The Republican establishment realizes full well that if the current level of violence continues into next year, with US deaths approaching 5,000 by November 2008, then the GOP will suffer a disastrous defeat in November. Moreover, the Democrats are unlikely to be as accommodating as they were with the last supplemental. It is the budget, and the need to continue financing the war, that will constitute the center of the debate beginning in September. Republicans up for reelection in ’08 will have to fish or cut bait on Iraq. As for Mr. Bush, he still seems to be on track to hand over the entire mess to his successor, including his permanent bases.

On May 21, 2007, the New England Journal of Medicine reported a study that found GlaxoSmithKline’s diabetes drug Avandia is associated with a 43% increase in heart attacks and possibly a 64% increase in cardiovascular death. The NEJM said it posted the article online ahead of its June 6, 2007 print edition because of its medical importance.

Experts point out that the studies analyzed for the NEJM report were not designed to look for heart risks, many were only 24 weeks long, and it may be that higher risks will appear after a longer term of use. Dr David Nathan, chief of diabetes care at Massachusetts General Hospital, who reviewed the paper for the NEJM, told the Associated Press, “This analysis is just scratching the surface of what may be there.”

Avandia (rosiglitazone) was FDA approved in 1999 for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, a disease that affects between 18 to 20 million Americans.

When approved, Glaxo promoted Avandia as being safer than Rezulin, a diabetes drug removed from the market in 2000 after serious cases of liver damage developed in patients taking the drug.

Avandia is currently the top selling diabetes drug with total US sales of $2.2 billion in 2006, according to IMS Health, a healthcare tracking information firm. A one-month supply sells for between $90 and $170, the Associated Press reported on May 23, 2007.

“More than 6 million people worldwide,” the Associated Press reports, “have taken the drug to control blood sugar since it came on the market eight years ago, and about 1 million Americans use it now.”

The FDA is going to have an extremely tough time wiggling out from under the rug of blame for this regulatory failure. The situation “reflects very badly on the FDA and on Glaxo,” Dr Nathan said. “It’s the FDA’s responsibility to be monitoring this stuff.”

In an editorial that accompanied the study in the NEJM, Dr Bruce Psaty of the University of Washington and Dr Furberg of Wake Forest University wrote: The drug “represents a major failure of the drug-use and drug-approval processes in the United States.”

They also state that “the rationale for prescribing rosiglitazone at this time is unclear,” because when the drug was approved its benefits were “at best mixed.”

Documents dating back 7 years show the FDA knew about the risks associated with Avandia and did nothing to protect consumers. The day after the new study appeared online, on May 23, 2007, Dr Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizen, a non-profit health research group, sent a letter to FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach, which described a July 16, 2002 FDA memo that showed FDA scientists had recommended that the label for Avandia be amended to include post-marketing reports of heart failure among patients taking the drug.

“The failure of the FDA to act on the recommendations made almost five years ago by its Division of Drug Risk Evaluation is yet another case in which the conclusions of scientists who are engaged in post-market drug safety review are not taken seriously enough or addressed soon enough,” Dr Wolfe said in a press release.

In the late 80’s while a group of us were hanging around the newsroom of a weekly newspaper in a town on the California coast complaining about Reagan and wars and things of that nature one of my colleagues a guy named Walter said something very simply, “I don’t like soldiers. They kill people.” He knew whereof he spoke, he and two family members escaped from the Ukraine in the mid-1940s to Canada. The rest of his family were killed or “left to die in the death camps”, as he put it. When someone asked him whose army it was that killed his family, the Soviets or the Nazis, he answered, “What difference does that make?” He never did tell us the answer.

Around the same time the owner of the paper, Mr. Blake, an old time newspaper man from the Chicago Tribune had been sending out memos for weeks headed “Very Important” with the message that soon smoking would no longer be permitted at the newspaper. In the memos he confided that while he sympathized with the smokers for he had once “happily smoked many a cigar” he had no choice but to issue the edict. The folks in advertising got real upset. How could they work without smoking? With increasing frequency Mr. Blake tacked up new memos warning of the impending deadline of the smoking ban.

The day of the cease-smoking arrived. One avid cigarette smoker in advertising had a mini-breakdown. She literally had to go to the hospital. The same group of us commented on her demise. “Poor Shirley,” Walter the guy from the Ukraine said.

Suddenly the door burst open. It was Doug the graphic artist and Vietnam vet who somehow missed seeing all the memos, somehow missed all the agitated talk in the advertising room where the people had been hysterical for weeks about the no-smoking ban. Somehow missed Shirley being carted off to the hospital.

“What is this crap, that I can’t smoke?” he screamed at us. He didn’t often come into our end of the newspaper but I guess he figured his anger was worth sharing. “What do you mean I can’t smoke!” he shouted again. “I fought a fucking war for you people and this is what I get for it”?

The sports writer looked up from his copy. “Yeah”, he said nonchalantly. “But you didn’t win.”

At that Doug slammed his tattered brief case into a nearby trash can and stormed out. It remained in the trash for three days while he went on a bender. He retrieved it when he eventually came back to work. Shirley had come back too. She was adjusting to smoking standing outside the building under the eaves in the rain.

Forty years ago many of us knew that the State, either through conscription as in the Vietnam war, or what it devised after that war, a standing professional army, sends its military men and women off to other countries to kill people because the ruling classes decide they want a war. These wars have nothing to do with you or me. They have nothing to do with our defense or spreading democracy or overcoming evil rogue leaders. Wars are done in the interests of the ruling classes who propagandize a sentimental message of patriotism. And even patriotism isn’t enough. The soldier or the taxpayer must be given a “moral stake” in a war, a “moral responsibility” to put down “evil.”

Someone wrote recently that Cindy Sheehan perhaps finally figured out that the “system” was the “real problem” and that sudden realization is what caused her to give up her fight against our obscene killing of other people in foreign countries. What is the system? Is this not merely a euphemism for the State? And what propels the perpetuation of the aggrandizement of the State? The military. And what propels the military? Among other things, our sentimental attachment to soldiers.

I have little sympathy for hired killers. Why not call a spade a spade? I’m still angry about the funerals I went to in the 60’s and 70’s where I saw my classmates dead from that other war. I still think about those boys, some I had known from the third grade. But I agree with the Ukrainian who refused to sentimentalize what it is they do. Patriotism is for fools. Sympathy for grieving mothers whose children get killed in America’s wars sucks us in even further which is why we see the constant drone of grieving parents on television telling us how their kids died believing in the “fight for freedom.” The “system” in one way or another turns us all into cannon fodder.

As far as world public opinion is concerned, as reflected in the international media, the pronouncements of freedom of expression groups, and of miscellaneous governments, Venezuela has finally taken the ultimate step to prove its opposition right: that Venezuela is heading towards a dictatorship. Judging by these pronouncements, freedom of speech is becoming ever more restricted in Venezuela as a result of the non-renewal of the broadcast license of the oppositional TV network RCTV. With RCTV going off the air at midnight of May 27th, the country’s most powerful opposition voice has supposedly been silenced.

It is generally taken for granted that any silencing of opposition voices is anti-freedom of speech. But is an opposition voice really being silenced? Is this the correct metaphor? Is the director of RCTV, Marcel Granier, actually being silenced? No, a better metaphor is that the megaphone that Granier (and others) used for the exercise of his free speech is being returned to its actual owners–a megaphone that he had borrowed, but never owned. Not only that, he is still allowed to use a smaller megaphone (cable & satellite).

In other words, the radio frequency that RCTV used for over half a century is being returned to its original owners-the Venezuelan people-under the management of its democratically elected leadership. Still, while the decision about how to use the airwaves might be the prerogative of the government (as many critics concede), critics of the move have a point when they complain that the freedom to use the airwaves cannot be solely a matter of majority rule. After all, shouldn’t minorities (in this case a mostly relatively wealthy minority) also have access to the megaphone, so it may use it to convince the majority of its point-of-view? At least, progressives who defend the rights of traditionally disenfranchised minorities would argue that minorities should always have access to the media. [1] Even though Marcel Granier and his friends cannot be considered to be a disenfranchised minority, surely this minority deserves to be heard in the media, at least a little bit, in the name of pluralism.

Alarming tales of a most prevalent and problematic substance

THE PORT OF PLYMOUTH in southwestern England is no longer listed among the scenic towns of the British Isles, although prior to World War II it would have qualified. During six nights of March and April 1941, Nazi bombs destroyed seventy-five thousand buildings in what is remembered as the Plymouth Blitz. When the annihilated city center was rebuilt, a modern concrete grid was superimposed on Plymouth’s crooked cobbled lanes, burying its medieval past in memory.

But the main history of Plymouth lies at its edge, in the natural harbor formed at the confluence of two rivers, the Plym and the Tamar, where they join the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. This is the Plymouth from which the Pilgrims departed; they named their American landfall across the sea in its honor. All three of Captain Cook’s Pacific expeditions began here, as did Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe. And, on December 27, 1831, H.M.S. Beagle set sail from Plymouth Harbor, with twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin aboard.

University of Plymouth marine biologist Richard Thompson spends a lot of time pacing Plymouth’s historic edge. He especially goes in winter, when the beaches along the harbor’s estuaries are empty—a tall man in jeans, boots, blue windbreaker, and zippered fleece sweater, his bald pate hatless, his long fingers gloveless as he bends to probe the sand. Thompson’s doctoral study was on slimy stuff that mollusks such as limpets and winkles like to eat: diatoms, cyanobacteria, algae, and tiny plants that cling to seaweed. What he’s now known for, however, has less to do with marine life than with the growing presence of things in the ocean that have never been alive at all.

Although he didn’t realize it at the time, what has dominated his life’s work began when he was still an undergraduate in the 1980s, spending autumn weekends organizing the Liverpool contingent of Great Britain’s national beach cleanup. In his final year, he had 170 teammates amassing metric tons of rubbish along eighty-five miles of shoreline. Apart from items that apparently had dropped from boats, such as Greek salt boxes and Italian oil cruets, from the labels he could see that most debris was blowing east from Ireland. In turn, Sweden’s shores were the receptacles for trash from England. Any packaging that trapped enough air to protrude from the water seemed to obey the wind currents, which in these latitudes are easterly.

Smaller, lower-profile fragments, however, were apparently controlled by currents in the water. Each year, as he compiled the team’s annual reports, Thompson noticed more and more garbage that was smaller and smaller amid the usual bottles and automobile tires. He and another student began collecting sand samples along beach strand lines. They sieved the tiniest particles of whatever appeared unnatural, and tried to identify them under a microscope. This proved tricky. Their subjects were usually too small to allow them to pinpoint the bottles, toys, or appliances from which they sprang.

He continued working the annual cleanup during graduate studies at Newcastle. Once he completed his PhD and began teaching at Plymouth, his department acquired a Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer, a device that passes a microbeam through a substance, then compares its infrared spectrum to a database of known material. Now he could know what he was looking at, which only deepened his concern.

“Any idea what these are?” Thompson is guiding a visitor along the shore of the Plym River estuary, near where it joins the sea. With a full moonrise just a few hours off, the tide is out nearly two hundred meters, exposing a sandy flat scattered with bladderwrack and cockle shells. A breeze skims the tidal pools, shivering rows of reflected hillside housing projects. Thompson bends over the strand line of detritus left by the forward edge of waves lapping the shore, looking for anything recognizable: hunks of nylon rope, syringes, topless plastic food containers, half a ship’s float, pebbled remains of polystyrene packaging, and a rainbow of assorted bottle caps. Most plentiful of all are multicolored plastic shafts of cotton ear-swabs. But there are also the odd little uniform shapes he challenges people to identify. Among twigs and seaweed fibers in his fistful of sand are a couple dozen blue and green plastic cylinders about two millimeters high.
“They’re called nurdles. They’re the raw materials of plastic production. They melt these down to make all kinds of things.” He walks a little farther, then scoops up another handful. It contains more of the same plastic bits: pale blue ones, greens, reds, and tans. Each handful, he calculates, is about 20 percent plastic, and each holds at least thirty pellets.

“You find these things on virtually every beach these days. Obviously they are from some factory.”

However, there is no plastic manufacturing anywhere nearby. The pellets have ridden some current over a great distance until they were deposited here—collected and sized by the wind and tide.

IN THOMPSON’S LABORATORY AT THE UNIVERSITY of Plymouth, graduate student Mark Browne unpacks foil-wrapped beach samples that arrive in clear zip-lock bags sent by an international network of colleagues. He transfers these to a glass separating funnel, filled with a concentrated solution of sea salt to float off the plastic particles. He filters out some he thinks he recognizes, such as pieces of the ubiquitous colored ear-swab shafts—to check under the microscope. Anything really unusual goes to the FTIR Spectrometer.

Each takes more than an hour to identify. About one-third turn out to be natural fibers such as seaweed, another third are plastic, and another third are unknown—meaning that they haven’t found a match in their polymer database, or that the particle has been in the water so long its color has degraded, or that it’s too small for their machine, which analyzes fragments only to twenty microns—slightly thinner than a human hair.

“That means we’re underestimating the amount of plastic that we’re finding. The true answer is we just don’t know how much is out there.”

What they do know is that there’s much more than ever before. During the early twentieth century, Plymouth marine biologist Alistair Hardy developed an apparatus that could be towed behind an Antarctic expedition boat, ten meters below the surface, to sample krill—the ant-sized, shrimplike invertebrate on which much of the planet’s food chain rests. In the 1930s, he modified it to measure even smaller plankton. It employed an impeller to turn a moving band of silk, similar to how a dispenser in a public lavatory moves cloth towels. As the silk passed over an opening, it filtered plankton from water passing through it. Each band of silk had a sampling capacity of five hundred nautical miles. Hardy was able to convince English merchant vessels using commercial shipping lanes throughout the North Atlantic to drag his Continuous Plankton Recorder for several decades, amassing a database so valuable he was eventually knighted for his contributions to marine science.

He took so many samples from around the British Isles that only every second one was analyzed. Decades later, Richard Thompson realized that the ones that remained stored in a climate-controlled Plymouth warehouse were a time capsule containing a record of growing contamination. He picked two routes out of northern Scotland that had been sampled regularly: one to Iceland, one to the Shetland Islands. His team pored over rolls of silk reeking of chemical preservative, looking for old plastic. There was no reason to examine years prior to World War II because until then plastic barely existed, except for the Bakelite used in telephones and radios, appliances so durable they had yet to enter the waste chain. Disposable plastic packaging hadn’t yet been invented.

By the 1960s, however, they were seeing increasing numbers of increasing kinds of plastic particles. By the 1990s, the samples were flecked with triple the amount of acrylic, polyester, and crumbs of other synthetic polymers than had been present three decades earlier. Especially troubling was that Hardy’s plankton recorder had trapped all this plastic ten meters below the surface, suspended in the water. Since plastic mostly floats, that meant they were seeing just a fraction of what was actually there. Not only was the amount of plastic in the ocean increasing, but ever smaller bits of it were appearing—small enough to ride global sea currents.

Thompson’s team realized that slow mechanical action—waves and tides that grind against shorelines, turning rocks into beaches—were now doing the same to plastics. The largest, most conspicuous items bobbing in the surf were slowly getting smaller. At the same time, there was no sign that any of the plastic was biodegrading, even when reduced to tiny fragments.

“We imagined it was being ground down smaller and smaller, into a kind of powder. And we realized that smaller and smaller could lead to bigger and bigger problems.”

He knew the terrible tales of sea otters choking on poly-ethylene rings from beer six-packs; of swans and gulls strangled by nylon nets and fishing lines; of a green sea turtle in Hawai’i dead with a pocket comb, a foot of nylon rope, and a toy truck wheel lodged in its gut. His personal worst was a study on fulmar carcasses washed ashore on North Sea coastlines. Ninety-five percent had plastic in their stomachs—an average of forty-four pieces per bird. A proportional amount in a human being would weigh nearly five pounds.

There was no way of knowing if the plastic had killed them, although it was a safe bet that, in many, chunks of indigestible plastic had blocked their intestines. Thompson reasoned that if larger plastic pieces were breaking down into smaller particles, smaller organisms would likely be consuming them. He devised an aquarium experiment, using bottom-feeding lugworms that live on organic sediments, barnacles that filter organic matter suspended in water, and sand fleas that eat beach detritus. In the experiment, plastic particles and fibers were provided in proportionately bite-sized quantities. Each creature promptly ingested them.

When the particles lodged in their intestines, the resulting constipation was terminal. But if the pieces were small enough, they passed through the invertebrates’ digestive tracts and emerged, seemingly harmlessly, out the other end. Did that mean that plastics were so stable that they weren’t toxic? At what point would they start to naturally break down—and when they did, would they release some fearful chemicals that would endanger organisms some time far in the future?

The recent sharp rise in US gasoline prices and the accompanying hardship for millions of people underscore once again the consequences of an energy market dominated by a few giant corporations. The price increase has been attributed to limited refining capacity, which has generated a sharp rise in refinery profits while facilitating market manipulation.

Gas prices in the US rose to record highs just in time for the Memorial Day weekend at the end of May, traditionally a time when many families drive long distances. Average gasoline prices reached $3.22 last week, approaching the record inflation-adjusted high of $3.29, set in 1981. In some parts of the country, prices rose considerably above that, with gasoline reaching as high as $3.69 a gallon in California.

The main beneficiaries of the surge in prices have been American refiners, which import crude oil and process it into gasoline and other products. Some of the major oil corporations, such as ExxonMobil and Chevron, are vertically integrated, combining oil extraction and refining operations. These companies have seen profitability of the refining portion of their business soar.

A Wall Street Journal article May 18 noted that refiners are pulling in more than $30 in profit before taxes and other expenses for every barrel of oil that they process, the most per barrel since the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. On the West Coast, where gasoline prices are higher than the national average, refinery profits are at $39 a barrel, more than double the average of $17 over the past five years, according to a March 9 report in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The large differential between the oil refinery revenues from the sale of gasoline and costs from the purchase of crude has been explained by shortages in refining capacity, which has reduced gasoline reserves as demand increases—leading to a rise in gas prices. All of the extra profit to the major refineries is coming directly out of the pockets of American consumers.

Bloomberg news service quoted Tom Betz, an oil broker with BNP Paribos Inc., as noting, “Probably stocks, based on demand, have never been lower in our history.” Demand is “very strong and is still rising as we head into driving season,” meaning that gasoline prices will stay high throughout the summer.

The rise in prices is hurting working class and lower-income families the most, as they have less disposable income to shift to transportation costs. This means that the high prices are cutting into other necessary spending, including food, prices for which are also rising throughout the country. An AP poll released May 25 found that 46 percent of the population said that high gasoline prices are causing severe financial problems.

The shortage of refining capacity is generally attributed in the media to a number of planned and unplanned refinery outages. However, refinery capacity has been deliberately decreased over the course of the past two decades, for the explicit purpose of boosting profit margins.

On the first anniversary of the beginning of last summer’s feverish uprising here, the city’s jewel-box plaza which had been occupied for seven months by striking teachers and their allies in the Oaxaca Peoples’ Popular Assembly (APPO) from May until October when federal police forced them into retreat, shimmered in the intense spring sunbeams. The only massive police presence on view was the city police department’s orchestra tootling strident martial airs to a shirt-sleeved crowd of gaffers. Here and there, handfuls of burley state cops, sweltering in bulletproof vests and helmets in hand, huddled in the shade quaffing “aguas frescas” (fruit water) and flirting with the senoritas.

Evidence of last summer’s occupation has been obliterated. Surrounding government buildings have been scrubbed clean of revolutionary slogans and no marches were scheduled to commemorate last May 22nd when the teachers first established their camp in the plaza. Indeed, militant members of Section 22 of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE) were not encamped in the stately old square for the first time since the section’s founding 27 years ago. Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (URO), the object of their fury, was still the despotic governor of Oaxaca.

Despite the relaxation of U.S. State Department travel advisories and the apparent calm, few tourists were strolling the cobblestone streets of Oaxaca’s “Historic Center”. long ago designated the patrimony of Humanity by UNESCO, and the cavernous colonial hotels around the plaza were virtually deserted. The 2006 uprising has put a serious kibosh on the international tourist trade, the backbone of the local economy. If the experience of San Cristobal de las Casas after the 1994 Zapatista uprising is any lesson, the tourist moguls will take years to recoup.

“Apparent calm” is a euphemism oft utilized to describe the uneasy lulls that mark social upheaval in Mexico. True to the nation’s volcanic political metabolism with its fiery spurts of molten fightback and sullen, brooding silences, the Oaxaca struggle seems to have entered into a period of internal contemplation.

Government repression, which featured death squad killings and the jailing of hundreds of activists, slammed the lid down on the social stew but did not extinguish it. Discontent continues to brew and fester, the bad gas building down below. The structures of the Popular Assembly and the teachers union, which served to catalyze this discontent throughout 2006, remain in tact.

To be sure, the rainbow of social movements that lit up red bulbs as far away as Washington last year, are not enjoying their best moments. Section 22, which itself is a loose amalgam of left factions, is wracked with division and dissonance and its titular leader Enrique Rueda Pacheco is held in profound contempt for having forced the strikers back into the classroom last October and abandoning the APPO to savage government repression.

Moreover, in response to the 70,000-strong Section 22’s rebellion against the leadership of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE), union czarina Elba Esther Gordillo, a close confidante of President Felipe Calderon, chartered a new Oaxaca local, Section 59, to diminish the control that the militants exert over the state’s classrooms.

The division has put a dent in the teachers’ usual aggressive stance and instead of walking out this past May 15th, National Teachers Day, when new contracts are negotiated, Section 22 tentatively accepted a 4.8$ base wage increase (above the 3.7% Calderon had conceded to other sectors) and 122 million bonus pesos to “re-zone” Oaxaca for cost of living increases in this tourism-driven state.

Caracas, May 31, 2007 (venezuelanalysis.com)— Organizations, journalists, students, activists and intellectuals in Venezuela accused the national and international media of waging a campaign against Venezuela and of supporting destabilization plans that have been carried out in the country in the past few days. According to declarations made by various groups and individuals, the RCTV protests and media coverage of them have a hidden agenda directed by the United States and their Venezuelan allies to destabilize the country.

At a press conference yesterday in Caracas, more than six hundred different social organizations, including communal councils, political movements, collectives, community media, and cooperatives signed a document in rejecting the “imperial interference to destabilize and overthrow the Bolivarian government.” The organizations support the Venezuelan government’s decision not to renew the broadcast license of the private TV network RCTV and insist that the protests in the country are a part of an imperial strategy.

“The Venezuelan people forcefully reject the interference of the United States government in the internal affairs of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Once again the CIA has put a destabilization plan in place with the objective of overthrowing the Bolivarian government and of assassinating President Hugo Chavez,” said the opening paragraph of the document.

Later in the document the text makes reference to recent revelations of “documents that show the payment in dollars of journalists” from RCTV and Globovision “by the government of the United States, through the National Endowment for Democracy, connected with the US State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency through Freedom House.”

The document assures that the plan seeks to create violence and deaths in the street with the intention of discrediting and weakening the government of Hugo Chavez.

In contradiction to the claims made by the media regarding freedom of expression in the country, the social organizations claim that RCTV and Globovision have systematically “called for subversion, chaos, fascism, terrorism, and assassination.”

“These television channels have been spokespersons of foreign interests, specifically those of the Bush government, whose final objective is to overthrow and assassinate President Hugo Chavez,” they said.

Eva Golinger, Venezuelan-American attorney and author of the recent book Bush vs. Chavez, affirmed these declarations yesterday, calling on all Venezuelans to be aware of the media offensive on the part of national and international media with the intention of destabilizing the country.

“We have to be very aware that there are actors that are looking to create a scenario that later is going to justify what they want, which is an international intervention, above all from the United States,” said Golinger.

Journalists and students in Venezuela have also denounced the media campaign in recent days. Journalist Ernesto Villegas assured that part of the destabilization plan surrounding the case of RCTV includes an immense media operation to create a situation similar to the 2002 coup attempt.

“Here what they are looking for is a death,” said Villegas on the state television channel VTV yesterday. “The opposition media insists on stressing the peaceful nature of the protests, but, in reality, we have been able to observe that they aren’t of that nature. We can see a clear intention to destabilize through the use of violence and provocation,” he said.

Students who support the government from various universities across the country also came out against the media campaign. In a statement released yesterday the students rejected the destabilization plan and warned the Venezuelan people to not be deceived.

“We, the university students, denounce before the country and the world the destabilization plan that is being promoted by the private media that respond to the interests of the national and transnational elite,” said the statement. “With this behavior they are trying again to break the constitutional order.”

“We reject and condemn the manipulation of the private media who use the freedom of expression guaranteed by law, to “denounce” a supposed abuse of that right on the part of the government,” they said.

“Likewise, we repudiate the use of that lie to alter the public order and peace, with the intention of creating situations similar to the events of April 11th 2002, and during the oil strike of 2002 and 2003.”

Some Argentinean intellectuals also came out against what they called a “disturbing” campaign in the international press earlier this week. Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel, filmmaker Fernando Pino Solanas, and sociologists Atilio Boron and Alcira Argumedo all condemned the campaign for trying to “convince the world” of the supposed “closure” of RCTV. According to the intellectuals, the media campaign is a “dangerous escalation of disinformation that could serve as a platform for other plans by Washington.”

Her rise to power sent shock waves through Chile’s political elites, who still, after a year of her government, remain implacable. Between the lines, their message could be read as this: “She is a woman, she acts like a woman, and women don’t know how to exert authority.”

A close look at the private lives of ordinary Chileans reveals changes that were quietly laying the groundwork that made it possible for a woman to become president in spite of the conservative influence of the Catholic Church and the political elites.

But after Bachelet’s first year in the government, many of her critics maintain they were right, since the center-left coalition is experiencing its worst period and showing obvious signs of wear.

If Michelle Bachelet can be criticized for anything it’s her inefficiency in constructing a story, an epic of this new form of governing—that of a woman who wants to govern as a woman, with geniality and greater participation of ordinary citizens.

Women Take Power

As is true of almost all Latin American countries, Chilean society has always been patriarchal. Ever since the Spanish conquest, the figure of the “señor” or “lord” reigned supreme in the large, landed estates and later in the cities. Until the 1960s, women were largely excluded from government, work, and business; their lives centered on matters of the home and child raising.

Military dictator Augusto Pinochet embodied the most stereotypical characteristics of this machismo: those of the omnipotent and authoritarian man. He promised order and security in exchange for liberty and human rights. Lucía Hiriart de Pinochet, wife of the dictator, told women to take a secondary role in support of their husbands.

With the end of the dictatorship in 1990, the democratic coalition installed a more benign patriarch: President Patricio Aylwin. Ricardo Lagos, the third president after the dictatorship, also represented a patriarchal figure who, in moments of conflict, would bang on the table to get the last word—a practice that increased his popularity.

Michelle Bachelet does not fit any of these characteristics. She is a socialist, agnostic, and daughter of a general assassinated by the dictatorship. She is separated, with children from different fathers; her youngest was born when she was single. She is seen as unpredictable in her friendly, feminine, maternal ways.

As Lagos’ minister of health and later of defense, she was well-liked. It was citizens, not the political class, who invested in her candidacy and later in her presidency.

It is no surprise that Al Gore is attacking Bush in his new book, of course. Nor is it a surprise that Gore accuses Bush of ignoring all reasonable evidence in both making the decision to invade Iraq and in deciding to do nothing about global warming.

What is important about what Gore is saying is his focus on how the pollution of America’s information environment by 1) corporate media consolidation (all television news is brought to Americans by five private corporations, the CEOs of which all vote Republican) and 2) government propaganda (i.e. lies purveyed to Americans using the money and resources of Americans).

Polling shows that the percentage of Americans who view Iran as the number one threat to the United States has risen to 27 percent now. I think it was only 20 percent in December 2006. First of all, how in the world can a developing country with about a fourth of the population of the US, about a $2000 per capita income (in real terms, not local purchasing power), with no intercontinental ballistic missiles, with no weapons of mass destruction (and no proof positive it is trying to get them), with a small army and a small military budget– how is such a country a “threat” to the United States of America? Iranian leaders don’t like the US, and they talk dirty about the US, and they do attempt to thwart US interests. The same is true of Venezuela under Chavez. But Tehran is a minor player on the world stage, and trying to build it up to replace the Soviet Union is just the worst sort of fear-mongering, and it is being done on behalf of the US military industrial complex, which wants to do to Iran what it did to Iraq. It is propaganda, and significant numbers of Americans (a 7 percent increase would be like 21 million people!) are buying it.

Why have those poll numbers gone up? Because the Bush administration is trying to hang the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq on Iran (and even trying to hang the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan on Iran). The message of administration and military spokesmen is that Iran is deliberately killing US troops and is a major source of insurgency in Iraq. No convincing evidence has ever been presented for either allegation, nor is it reasonable to assume that Iran plays a significant role in funding hyper-Sunni, Shiite-killing death squads to deliberately destabilize its client governments in Baghdad (al-Maliki) and Kabul (Karzai). Yet the New York Times and even the Guardian put this b.s. on the front page, and of course it is all over CNN, Fox Cable News, MSNBC, etc. Are US journalists trapped in the dictates of the military-industrial complex by virtue of working for these mega corporations? We know that Roger Ailes at Fox Cable News orders his employees how to spin the day’s news (he is a former high Republican Party official). Has any of the journalists counted up how many of the 127 US troops killed in Iraq in May was killed in Sunni Arab areas and how many in Shiite neighborhoods? Has any of them actually read the translated communiques on World News Connection of the Sunni Arab guerrillas and what they say about Iran and Shiites? Has any demanded air tight proof and non-anonymous sources before printing this garbage?

No.

Alternating between “with us or against us”, “bring ’em on” snarling or “why do they hate us?” whining, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney characterize Americanism at its most crass and banal. The suave barbarism of Condoleezza Rice, John Negroponte or Robert Zoellick offers a more insidious version, but one no less repugnant. Based on crude US chauvinism, a facilitating medium for empire, Americanism is inherently anti-humanitarian and anti-democratic. The Bush regime’s trashing of domestic and international legal and human rights norms is Americanism rampant. Americanism deliberately confounds the undeniable contributions of the United States’ peoples to human development with itself. Individuals like John Negroponte and Robert Zoellick exploit that confusion to camouflage their corporate imperialist assault on the interests of the majority of people in the United States.

Americanism affirms that the United States is all that really counts of the Americas, North, Central or South. It regards everything about and in Latin America as inferior, as it does all the Americas’ indigenous peoples. Americanism presumes that the lives of United States citizens – except for the impoverished and the non-white – are worth more than the lives of people in other countries. Americanism skims glibly over multiple mass-murder on the basis that the United States is accountable to no one. It glosses over its historical crimes – slavery, the genocide of North American indigenous peoples and the invasion and/or occupation of many other peoples and their lands. Those crimes are treated at most as regrettable blemishes, past and, bar Iraq and Afghanistan, no longer relevant.

Applying even rudimentary notions of Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism helps render more clearly not just the obnoxious folly Americanism engenders but also its well-calculated political and economic consequences. Americanism still encourages people to view Latin America as a conquered physical and conceptual space – a ready victim for demeaning US and European superimposed caricatures of impotence, cruelty, stupidity, inefficiency. Europe’s intimidating illusions of presumptuous superiority reinforce Americanism’s racist patrimony. As the US comes to terms with its incipient imperial decline, Americanism may be mutating. But it remains the basis for the never-ending attacks on alternatives that reject US domination.

Resistance leaders from Jose Marti and Augusto Sandino to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez have consistently turned the caricatures on their heads. Ever diminishing differences between competing United States, European and Pacific imperialisms have acted upon corresponding divergences among the varieties of resistance they have provoked. ALBA – the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas – is the most recent self-definition of Latin American resistance and necessarily entails an emphasis on integration. Peoples united are much harder to defeat. Since current conditions demand different strategies, Americanism’s proponents develop often shifting but singularly purposeful policies – consolidating alliances with existing elites, most obviously in Mexico and Colombia, and co-opting emergent political and economic actors wherever possible, as in Brazil and Uruguay.

A large part of the superiority Americanism assigns itself resides in what Said wrote about the Orient “The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader or the soldier was in or thought about the Orient because he could be there or could think about it with very little resistance on the Orient’s part.” (1) Corporate globalization – dominated by US, European and Pacific multinationals and the politicians who front for them – is an effort to make permanent that ability to be wherever Americanism deems necessary with relatively little resistance. Americanism insists the United States and its allies must be able to be in target victim-countries as they please, while migration from those countries must be policed ever more rigidly. The proposed anti-migrant border wall between Mexico and the United States is Americanism’s concrete and razor wire apotheosis.

Cutting at the apparently seamless texture presented by would-be dominant versions of reality, like Americanism, exposes their discontinuities, their constructedness, and the fluidity of their production processes. Up against it, the understandable tendency, a kind of intellectual and moral fight-or-flight, is to veer between critical incisiveness and iconoclastic clearance towards a way out into open ground. The impulse tends both to challenge and to escape illegitimate authority’s insincere or downright mendacious workings, the sadistic criminality of its military invasions and occupations and its persistently destructive hypocritical economic interventions.

A crucial contest with the delinquent authority appropriated by suffocating orthodoxies like Americanism is over the construction of events and memories and their representations. However diffuse the spoken, textual or visual record of events, these still seep across time and memory. Their presences and absences stain, color and mark what we are able to think and what we do in fact think, what we say or write, what images we produce, what music we make. In Christian scriptural studies, the 19th century theologian Franz Overbeck argued the historical role of apocryphal texts was to define the canon – marginality and heresy defining order.

Control of the various sieves and filters of information has always been as essential as military force in imposing political and economic control. Authorized versions and imprimaturs have never gone away. They include current attempts to harass dissenting academics include cases like those of Ward Churchill or Norman Finkelstein. Fierce distortion of the recovery from the local big business oligarchy by the Venezuelan State of RCTV for use as a public service channel is another. Yet another is the suppression of information about the five Cuban anti-terrorists unjustly imprisoned in high security jails while super-terrorist Luis Posada Carriles walks free.

Just as egregious is the mass censorship by the corporate media of events in Mexico and Haiti over the last couple of years. In Mexico the routine use of torture by the police, mass rape and assault in Atenco, lawless repression in Oaxaca, the electoral fraud of July 2006 all have been handled with kid gloves, if at all, by international corporate news outlets. In Haiti the massacres of civilians by UN mercenaries have gone deliberately under-reported by the world’s corporate media. They slavishly perpetuate Americanism’s perception-management chokehold on what constitutes, or not, international news.

The various elites obsessed with power, control, status and prestige that promote Americanism use these means and many more to transmit, protect and promote their excuses, rationalizations, self-justifications and prejudices. Corporate European and US media coverage of events in Iraq, Palestine, Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Somalia, Haiti or Afghanistan shows clearly how in an unequal relation, the interpretations and versions of the less powerful are restricted, their expression intimidated, crushed. The constantly accumulating hoard of dominant interpretations of the historical record and their management create a vast, dense archive of intimidation deployed by powerful elites to face down critical questioning and skepticism.

With regard to Americanism, the latest battleground for Latin American autonomy is the resurgence of the role of the State following the failure of the neo-liberal model on its ostensibly argued terms, if not its encrypted purpose – the consolidation of power and concentration of wealth. Ideas about or discussion and analysis of Latin America are certainly greatly determined by the fact of its colonial and neo-colonial subordination to the US and Europe. But that fact is diffused through a plethora of activities and divisions of labor which demand a persistent state of alert and resistance to the ways Americanism transmits and reproduces itself.

John Negroponte’s recent visit to Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador confirmed that the US State Department is rigging its diplomatic machinery to the hum of a less crudely debilitating white noise. The effort is to see if changing the tone and dynamic of the psychological stress might not still be effective in reducing Latin American subjects to putty in US hands. For his part, Thomas Shannon, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs uses a mellow style that superficially supplants traditional “do what we want or else…” US diplomatic argot.

But one has only to remember the “ham-and-eggs” diplomacy of Ambassador Dwight D. Morrow dealing with President Calles during the Cristero War in Mexico to realize that talking softly regularly accompanies the traditional big stick. Modernizing the workings of Americanism will remain central to US government and allied efforts to recoup lost ground for corporate imperialism in Latin America. Current continuing US efforts with local allies to destabilize Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua demonstrate that challenging and exposing Americanism will be a constant and crucial task to defend and preserve fundamental rights of the majority in Latin America.

toni solo is an activist based in Central America – toni.tortillaconsal.com

NEW YORK (June 2) – Federal authorities announced Saturday they had broken up a suspected Muslim terrorist cell planning a “chilling” attack to destroy New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, kill thousands of people and trigger an economic catastrophe by blowing up a jet fuel artery that runs through residential neighborhoods.

Three men, one of them a former member of Guyana’s parliament, were arrested and one was being sought in Trinidad as part of a plot that authorities said they had been tracked for more than a year and was foiled in the planning stages.

“The devastation that would be caused had this plot succeeded is just unthinkable,” U.S. Attorney Roslynn R. Mauskopf said at a news conference, calling it “one of the most chilling plots imaginable.”

In an indictment charging the four men, one of them is quoted as saying the foiled plot would “cause greater destruction than in the Sept. 11 attacks,” destroying the airport, killing several thousand people and destroying parts of New York’s borough of Queens, where the line runs underground.

One of the suspects, Russell Defreitas, a U.S. citizen native to Guyana and retired JFK air cargo employee, said the airport named for the slain president was targeted because it is a symbol that would put “the whole country in mourning.”

“It’s like you can kill the man twice,” said Defreitas, 63, who first hatched his plan more than a decade ago when he worked as a cargo handler for a service company, according to the indictment.

Authorities said the men were motivated by hatred toward the U.S., Israel and the West. Defreitas was recorded saying he “wanted to do something to get those bastards.”

Despite their efforts, the men never obtained any explosives, authorities said.