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in October
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Today's
Stories
September 4, 2003
Joanne Mariner
Truth,
Justice and Reconciliation in Latin America
September 3, 2003
Virginia Tilley
Hyperpower
in a Sinkhole
Davey D
A Hip
Hop Perspective on the Cali Recall
Emrah Göker
Conscripting Turkey: Imperial Mercenaries Wanted
John Stanton
The US is a Power, But Not Super
Brian Cloughley
The
Pentagon's Bungled PsyOps Plan
Dan Bacher
Another Big Salmon Kill
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors Weep' Ninth Circuit Overturns 127 Death Sentences
Uri Avnery
First
of All This Wall Must Fall
Website of the Day
Art Attack!
September 2, 2003
Robert Fisk
Bush's
Occupational Fantasies Lead Iraq Toward Civil War
Kurt Nimmo
Rouind Up the Usual Suspects: the Iman Ali Mosque Bombing
Robert Jensen / Rahul Mahajan
Iraqi Liberation, Bush Style
Elaine Cassel
Innocent But Guilty: When Prosecutors are Dead Wrong
Jason Leopold
Ghosts
in the Machines: the Business of Counting Votes
Dave Lindorff
Dems in 2004: Perfect Storm or Same Old Doldrums?
Paul de Rooij
Predictable
Propaganda: Four Monts of US Occupation
Website of the Day
Laughing Squid
Recent
Stories
August 30 / Sept. 1,
2003
Alexander Cockburn
Handmaiden
in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall
of the UN
Saul Landau
Schwarzenegger
and Cuban Migration
Standard Schaefer
Who
Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Gary Leupp
Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial
William S. Lind
Send the Neocons to Baghdad
Augustin Velloso
Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey
Jorge Mariscal
The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante
John Ross
A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power
Mickey Z.
War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler
Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts
Stan Cox
Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun
Tom and Judy Turnipseed
Take Back Your Time Day
Adam Engel
The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY
Adam Engel
An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Susan Davis
Northfork,
an Accidental Review
Nicholas Rowe
Dance
and the Occupation
Mark Zepezauer
Operation
Candor
Poets' Basement
Albert, Guthrie and Hamod
Website of the Weekend
Downhill
Battle
August 29, 2003
Lenni Brenner
God
and the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
Brian Cloughley
When in Doubt, Lie Your Head Off
Alice Slater
Bush Nuclear Policy is a Recipe for National Insecurity
David Krieger
What Victory?
Marjorie Cohn
The Thin Blue Line: How the US Occupation of Iraq Imperils International
Law
Richard Glen Boire
Saying Yes to Drugs!
Bister, Estrin and Jacobs
Howard Dean, the Progressive Anti-War Candidate? Some Vermonters
Give Their Views
Website of the Day
DirtyBush
August 28, 2003
Gilad Atzmon
The
Most Common Mistakes of Israelis
David Vest
Moore's
Monument: Cement Shoes for the Constitution
David Lindorff
Shooting Ali in the Back: Why the Pacification is Doomed
Chris Floyd
Cheap Thrills: Bush Lies to Push His War
Wayne Madsen
Restoring the Good, Old Term "Bum"
Elaine Cassel
Not Clueless in Chicago
Stan Goff
Nukes in the Dark
Tariq Ali
Occupied
Iraq Will Never Know Peace
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Behold, My Package
Website of the Day
Palestinian
Artists
August 27, 2003
Bruce Jackson
Little
Deaths: Hiding the Body Count in Iraq
John Feffer
Nuances and North Korea: Six Countries in Search of a Solution
Dave Riley
an Interview with Tariq Ali on the Iraq War
Lacey Phillabaum
Bush's Holy War in the Forests
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Website of the Day
The Dean Deception
August 26, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing the Dead
David Lindorff
The
Great Oil Gouge: Burning Up that Tax Rebate
Sarmad S. Ali
Baghdad is Deadlier Than Ever: the View of an Iraqi Coroner
Christopher Brauchli
Bush Administration Equates Medical Pot Smokers with Segregationists
Juliana Fredman
Collective Punishment on the West Bank: Dialysis, Checkpoints
and a Palestinian Madonna
Larry Siems
Ghosts of Regime Changes Past in Guatemala
Elaine Cassel
Onward, Ashcroft Soldiers!
Saul Landau
Bush:
a Modern Ahab or a Toy Action Figure?
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 25, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Israeli Outlaws in America
David Bacon
In Iraq, Labor Protest is a Crime
Thomas P. Healy
The Govs Come to Indy: Corps Welcome; Citizens Locked Out
Norman Madarasz
In an Elephant's Whirl: the US/Canada Relationship After the
Iraq Invasion
Salvador Peralta
The Politics of Focus Groups
Jack McCarthy
Who Killed Jancita Eagle Deer?
Uri Avnery
A Drug
for the Addict
August 23/24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
August 22, 2003
Carole Harper
Post-Sandinista
Nicaragua
John Chuckman
George Will: the Marquis of Mendacity
Richard Thieme
Operation Paperclip Revisited
Chris Floyd
Dubya Indemnity: Bush Barons Beyond the Reach of Law?
Issam Nashashibi
Palestinians
and the Right of Return: a Rigged Survey
Mary Walworth
Other People's Kids
Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Website of the Day
Current Energy
August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
4, 2003
Lame-Duck Fox Held
Hostage by Old Guard
Mexico's
Hopes for Democracy Hit Dead-End
By JOHN ROSS
Mexico City.
When President Vicente Fox marched stiffly (he
has a painfully sore back) down the central aisle of the Mexican
congress this past September 1st on his way to render his annual
State of the Union address ('El Informe'), the usual adulation
was muted and protest nil. Even the Left-wing opposition did
not bother to turn their backs to the President, a long-standing
"Informe" tradition here. Indeed, it seemed almost
as if Mexico's political class had abandoned all interest in
Vicente Fox whose grievous setback in last July's mid-term election
has cast him as a lame-duck president for the next three years
and a virtual political has-been.
Last July 6th, the once-ruling (71 years)
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which Fox's National
Action Party displaced from power in 2000, topped the right-wing
PAN by a million vote margin 35% to 32% (Fox beat the PRI by
2.4 million votes just three years ago). The PRI win gave the
Institutionals a total of 222 out of 500 seats in Mexico's lower
house of congress while the PAN's delegation dropped by a whopping
50 deputies - most of these seats were picked up by the left-center
Party of the Democratic Revolution which took its customary 17%
of the national vote.
As a result, the PRI will enjoy its largest
relative majority in the Chamber of Deputies since 1997 - the
Party now controls both houses of congress by comfortable majorities
as well as the flow of legislation that accompanies such control.
For the past three years, the once - and apparently future -
ruling party has thwarted all of Fox's reform initiatives, miring
the country in legislative gridlock.
The July 6th onslaught at the polls also
gave the PRI four out of six governorships up for grabs that
day. In five states, the party won a "carro complete"
("full car" in PRI speak), taking every federal district
in the entity - in a sixth, Chiapas, the Institutionals won 11
out of 12. The big sweep puts the PRI in the driver's seat for
the 2006 presidential election.
But despite the party's happy numbers,
the unquestionable winner last July 6th was apathy. Despite the
most ballyhooed midterm balloting in Mexican electoral history,
an effort that included a record number of candidates (10,000)
and parties (11), plus an unprecedented 65 million registered
voters, 59% of the electorate stayed away from the polls. In
a national show of pessimism at the faltering political process
here, only four out of every 10 Mexicans cast a ballot (seven
out of 10 voted in the Fox fiesta of 2000) and the numbers for
all three major political parties plunged steeply.
Notwithstanding the wholesale rejection
of the voters, U.S. State Department spokes Richard Boucher lauded
"the strength and vitality of Mexican democracy" in
a post-election press statement. But many Mexicans rue the direction
that national politics have taken during the first three years
of Vicente Fox's Prozac-like presidency.
Although the 2003 election was billed
as a referendum on Fox's stay in office (it was and he lost badly),
it was also a referendum on the performance of the parties and
the verdict was a sharp dose of public contempt. "Mexicans
did vote July 6th" affirmed a newspaper ad paid for by a
network of civil society groups, "they voted against the
political parties." The ad damned the parties as "slaves
to self interest" and enunciated a program that would allow
non-partisan candidates to run in federal and state elections.
Vicente Fox's downfall was eminently
predictable. A master of marketing and one-time president of
Coca Cola-Mexico, he sold himself to the electorate as "the
Real Thing" and, like the product he promoted for so many
years, proved to be mostly bubbles and artificial sweetener.
Despite his fixation on the buzzword "change", Fox
could deliver none and the great hopes for a democratic Mexico
that accompanied his 2000 victory, were quickly deflated.
Nonetheless, the Mexican president's
undoing was not entirely his own doing. Following in the footsteps
of his PRI predecessors Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo, Fox
has wedded his presidency to the White House where the ride has
been a bumpy one for his partner George W. Bush. Elected in the
same year (Bush was more accurately "selected"), Fox
has suffered the hard knocks of 9/11 (the terrorist attack torpedoed
a possible immigration agreement), the war in Iraq (Washington
tongue-lashed Mexico for failing to back up Bush's illegal invasion),
and an economic nose-dive north of the border that has reverberated
here in the highest unemployment numbers since the economic collapse
of 1995.
In fact, Fox's first three years in office
look a lot like Bush's - but without a 9/11 or Iraq war to drum
up patriotic frenzy, characterized as they both have been by
steady economic deterioration.
The phantasm of a resuscitated PRI reconquering
power in 2006 has been a-gallop throughout the land since the
July stampede. Such a sanguine outcome is enthusiastically prognosticated
by PRI president Roberto Madrazo who will probably be his party's
presidential candidate. But for many in the opposition, the re-installation
of "The Perfect Dictatorship" as novelist Mario Vargas
Llosa once labeled the PRI, would be "a tragedy for the
democratic aspirations of the Mexican people and for all of Latin
America" Argentinean exile Guillermo Almeyra recently op-editorialized
in the left daily La Jornada.
Still, although it remains the only party
with a national rather than a regional constituency, the PRI
is hardly the "aplanadora" ("steamroller"
in PRI-ese) it once was. Its "victory" this July 6th
was achieved with less votes than the party has ever registered
in any previous federal election - the PRI's 35% winning margin
was 2% less than its losing tally in 2000. The party's legitimacy,
always dubious, hit rock bottom with revelations of the 2000
"Pemexgate" campaign funding scandal, and, wracked
by schism, the divided PRI will not always vote as one in the
new congress Fox called into session September 1st.
The one-time Official Party is also broke.
Fined a billion pesos by the Federal Electoral Institute for
the Pemexgate flimflam, the PRI has no budget for the next two
years and Madrazo and his controversial secretary-general Elba
Esther Gordillo no longer draw salaries (although the expense
money still flows like the mighty Amazon.) A recent visit to
the party's mausoleum-like monoliths on North Insurgents Avenue
here by a Proceso magazine reporter revealed darkened offices,
littered floors, (janitorial service has been canceled). and
no toilet paper in the bathrooms.
In truth, for the PRI, power has passed
from its high-rise headquarters on Insurgentes where so many
presidents were unveiled and crowned, to the mansions of the
PRI's 19 state governors who still have the patronage budgets
to service the party's electoral clientele.
Now a hostage of the PRI-dominated congress,
the lame-duck Fox is suing for peace. Two weeks after the July
fracaso, Fox's attorney general Rafael Macedo de La Concha dropped
most criminal proceedings against a dozen PRI honchos implicated
in Pemexgate in an apparent quid pro quo to quash further PRI
probing into the president's own "Amigogate" campaign
funding brouhaha, and to buy a little breathing room in the new
congress for compromise on his reforms.
The PRI may be too busy squabbling to
attend to the offer. The party's legislative delegation has split
over the Madrazo-engineered selection of Gordillo as boss of
the PRI's congressional representation with nasty invective and
allegations of phone-bugging making daily headlines. Gordillo,
a former education workers' union chief who was recently compared
to Jimmy Hoffa by the Wall Street Journal, is vilified in some
PRI circles because of her close connections with President Fox
and the formerly reviled ex-president Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
The re-emergence of Salinas from the
swamp of ignominy, synchronized as it is with the recent PRI
surge, has a lot of eyebrows wiggling here. Stigmatized by the
lurid events of 1994 when his hand-picked successor was assassinated
in Tijuana and his own brother fingered as the mastermind of
a hit on the PRI secretary-general, Salinas fled the country
amidst the wreckage of his "miracle" economy, and has
wandered in self-imposed exile from Dublin to Havana ever since,
lugging around his 1400-page apologia for his presidency to international
book fairs in a pathetic ploy for vindication.
But under Fox, the first Mexican president
ever to rise from the ranks of the opposition, Carlos Salinas
has quietly slipped back into his palatial Tlalpan (south Mexico
City) digs, even voted for the first time since he left office
nine years ago, and now gives magnanimous interviews to the New
York Times (if not to the Mexican press.) Insiders speak of nightly
meetings at the Tlalpan hacienda as Salinas's once-extensive
network of loyalists creep out of their holes to rally around
the Godfather. Madrazo, the PRI presidential front-runner, is
a long-time Salinas protege and Elba Esther took over the teachers'
union with his permission.
Several dozen allies of the man Mexico
loves to hate, including former cabinet ministers, have seats
in the new congress - and the splinter parties Salinas created
to undermine the PRD, the Party of Labor (PT), the Mexican Green
Ecology Party (PVEM), and Democratic Convergence, will share
26 deputies in the lower house, who will at least listen to the
ex-president's proposals.
Although his re-entry seems part of a
pattern of political come-backs by such Latin American oldies-but-not-so-goodies
as Carlos Menem, Alan Garcia, and the blood-splattered General
Efrain Rios-Montt in Guatemala, Salinas's advantage is that he
will not and cannot run for president and is not vulnerable to
electoral vicissitudes. Playing the "tlatoani" or Aztec
king-maker, will probably mitigate Salinas's thirst for political
vindication if not for public acceptance. "We just don't
want him here" Manuel Garcia snorted rudely as he pushed
a cafe-con-leche across the counter at the La Blanca, a downtown
hub, one recent rainy August night.
If the fortunes of the PRI are less than
meet the eye, its chief competitors are in similar disarray.
Big loser in the new congress, the PAN has somehow misplaced
3,000,000 voters since 2000 and has no attractive candidate for
2006 now that Vicente has laid down the law and barred his wife
Marta de Fox from tossing her tiara into the ring. Enmeshed in
a spreading influence trafficking scandal involving its senate
leaders Diego Fernandez de Cevallos and Fausi Hamdan, PANista
corruption is now indistinguishable from that of their predecessors
in power.
The PRD, like the PRI, is technically
bankrupt with outstanding debts in the $30 million USD range.
Its electoral totals have declined precipitously by three million
votes in the last six years although PRD representation in the
new congress has virtually doubled to 92 thanks to the PAN's
widespread slippage. Besieged by party "tribes" or
pressure groups, PRD head and presidential hopeful Rosario Robles
resigned and stomped out of an August party congress.
Despite the installation of the new legislature,
the prognosis is not bright for recovery of political credibility
here. The paralysis of the PRD, the cynicism of the PAN, and
public disillusionment at Fox's failure to stimulate meaningful
change, plus the PRI's triumphal resurgence from the political
muck, is lamentable evidence that Mexico's eternal hope for a
democratic transition has once again hit a dead-end.
John Ross
will be covering the ins and outs of the upcoming World Trade
Organization's Cancun clambake September 10th-14th and the globalphobe
fiesta that will accompany it.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 30 / Sept. 1, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Handmaiden
in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall
of the UN
Saul Landau
Schwarzenegger
and Cuban Migration
Standard Schaefer
Who
Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Gary Leupp
Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial
William S. Lind
Send the Neocons to Baghdad
Augustin Velloso
Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey
Jorge Mariscal
The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante
John Ross
A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power
Mickey Z.
War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler
Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts
Stan Cox
Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun
Tom and Judy Turnipseed
Take Back Your Time Day
Adam Engel
The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY
Adam Engel
An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Susan Davis
Northfork,
an Accidental Review
Nicholas Rowe
Dance
and the Occupation
Mark Zepezauer
Operation
Candor
Poets' Basement
Albert, Guthrie and Hamod
Website of the Weekend
Downhill
Battle
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