Today's Stories

April 30, 2008

William P. O'Connor
The Day I Lost My Innocence

April 29, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Military Option

Roedad Khan
Why Gen. Musharraf Must Go

Chris Floyd
The Torture Election

Paul Craig Roberts
The Iraq War Morphs Into the Iran War

Dave Lindorff
Invasion of the Pumpheads

Mats Svensson
Mental Barriers in Palestine

Peter Morici
Will the Fed Broaden Its Focus?

Mike Ferner
Inside American Royalty's Security Bubble

John Weisheit
Towing Icebergs to San Pedro

Amit Srivastava
China Olympics, Tibet Crackdown, Coke Profits

Website of the Day
Tom Friedman Gets Creamed

April 28, 2008

JoAnn Wypijewski
On Queen's Boulevard, the Night Sean Bell's Killers Got Off

Mike Whitney
Jeremiah Wright Delivers the Knockout Punch: But Will It Topple Obama?

Iris Keltz
The Fruiting Fig Tree: Memories of East Jerusalem

Steve Niva
The New Walls of Baghdad: the Israeli Model Surges Toward Iraq

David Macaray
CAFTA's Bloodtrails

John Ross
"Adelitas" Shut Down Mexico's Congress

Stephen Lendman
The Politics of Green Scare

Malou Innocent
On "Withdrawing Responsibly" from Iraq

Christopher Brauchli
Want to Learn the Ins-and-Outs of the Slumping Economy? Just Ask Ashley ...

William Kaufman
Michael Moore's Embrace of Obama: a Polemic Devoid of Politics

Website of the Day
Get Your Fix

April 26 / 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Nothing Will Get Hillary Out of the Race

Ralph Nader
A World of Hunger

Peter Camejo
A Crying Shame: the Wages of Left Capitulation

Harvey Wasserman
Making You Pay for the Next Chernobyl--in Advance!

Franklin Lamb
Will U.S. Policy in Lebanon and the Middle East Ever Change?

Wajahat Ali
Fisk Fighting: an Exclusive Interview with Robert Fisk

Mike Whitney
Food Riots and Speculators

Andrew Wimmer
Obliterate Them!

David Yearsley
Nero, Frederick the Great, Nixon ... They All Did It Better Than Clinton

Greg Moses
Chicago: the Stupid Experiment

Ron Jacobs
Walking the Lonely Road

Robert Fantina
Bush v. Carter: Let History Judge

Missy Comley Beattie
Introducing President McCain

Linn Cohen-Cole
The Criminalization of Raw Milk: a Mennonite Farmer is Hauled Away

Paul Krassner
Remembering Ruben Salazar

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Buknatski, Khaiyat, Lair, and Kowit

Website of the Weekend
Justice for Sean Bell

April 25, 2008

George Ciccariello-Maher
Embedded with the Tupamaros

Dave Lindorff
The Bitter and the Biased: How Clinton Courted Racists in Pennsylvania

Franklin Lamb
The Israeli Project Has Failed in Lebanon

Alan Farago
Hacking the Development Code: the Politics of Zoning in Florida

John W. Farley
Syiran Nukes: the Phantom Menace

Kathleen M. Barry
Some Questions for "Femininists for Clinton:" Is There Really Any Difference Between Hillary and Condi?

Mohammed Alireza
Cowboys and Iranians

Nick Dearden
Haiti and the Black Hole of Debt

Carmelo Ruiz Marrero
Why Biotech is Betting on Biofuels

Bruce Springsteen
Farewell to Danny

Website of the Day
It's Bigger Than Hip Hop

April 24, 2008

Linn Washington, Jr.
Duplicity Demeans Clinton Campaign (or When Bill Praised Farrakhan)

Franklin Lamb
Bush to Nasrallah: an Offer Hezbollah Cannot Refuse?

Jennifer Van Bergen
The High Crimes of John Yoo: the President's Executioner

Joanne Mariner
U.S. Hypocrisy and the Malaysian Guantánamo

Mark Engler
Trade Politics and the Battle for the Soul of the Democratic Party

Dave Lindorff
The Politics of Obliteration: Hillary's Monstrous Threat

John Blair
Obama's Missed Opportunities in Evansville: Did He Even Know It Was Earth Day?

De Clarke / Stan Goff
Politics is Food is Politics

Binoy Kampmark
Bowling for Boris: the Tories, Red Ken and the London Mayoral Race

Philippe Marlière
Sarkozy and the Specter of May 68

Peter Morici
The Bank of England Misses the Point

Website of the Day
Fair Food Nation

April 23, 2008

Cockburn / St. Clair
Straggling to Denver

Vijay Prashad
McCain's Mask

Paul Craig Roberts
What the Iraq War is About

Stephen Soldz
The Involuntary Drugging of U.S. Detainees

Laura Santina
Hillary: Another Feminist Perspective

John Stauber /
Sheldon Rampton
Pentagon News Networks

Dave Lindorff
What Double Digit Win? Media Round Up in PA

George Ciccariello-Maher
Radical Chavismo Growls a Challenge

Ralph Nader
Andy Stern's Rackets

John Weisheit
Rearranging Deck Chairs at Glen Canyon Dam

Website of the Day
Wal-Mart's "Cost of Admission"

April 22, 2008

David Isenberg
Spinning Saddam's Linkages

Stan Cox
The Political Economics of Greenwashing

David Macaray
Memo to the Clinton Campaign: They Are Still Murdering Labor Unionists in Colombia

Jeff Birkenstein
Playing the Opposite Game: Or Why Can't I Sell Out?

Mike Whitney
Memo to Bernanke: Enough With the Rate Cuts, Already!

Nikolas Kozloff
Bush's Paraguayan Fiasco

Floyd Rudmin
From Lhasa to Bilbao: Journey of a Double Standard

Carlos Villarreal
Why John Yoo Should be Dismissed From Boalt Law School--And Prosecuted

Ray McGovern
What About the War, Pope Benedict?

Michael Gould-Wartofsky
El Barrio Fights Back Against Globalized Gentrification

Robert Ovetz
A Fish Tale

Pat Wolff
Rightwing Power Grab in Cornhusker State

Website of the Day
Defend the Rutgers 3!

April 21, 2008

Bill Quigley
The U.S. Role in Haiti's Food Riots

Uri Avnery
The Lion and the Gazelle

Dave Lindorff
The U.S. Economy and the Costs of War

Wajahat Ali
Finding Osama Bin Laden with Morgan Spurlock

Andy Worthington
Hollow Gestures at Guantánamo

Robert Jensen
The Sorrows of Race and Gender

Ron Jacobs
Clampdown at Evergreen

Dan Bacher
The Great Salmon Closure

Harvey Wasserman
Where's George?

Danny Alexander
Remembering Danny Federici

Website of the Day
Save Our Taco Trucks!

April 19 / 20, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
McCain: What Really Happened When He Was a POW?

Patrick Cockburn
A New Struggle is Beginning in Iraq

Wajahat Ali
Zinn Speaks

Andrew Wimmer
Papal Benedictions

Rev. William E. Alberts
Jeremiah Wright and America's Continuing "Separate and Unequal" Societies

David Rosen
Texas Two-Step: The Polygamy Raid and the Regulation of Sexual Life

Robert Fantina
McCain Detests War?

Ramzy Baroud
The Politics of Armageddon: McCain's Pastors and the Middle East

Saul Landau
The No Escape Clause on Iraq

Dr. Susan Block
Raelians, Aliens and Evolution

David Yearsley
Suitcase Arias and Ithacan Jazz

Phyllis Pollack
On the Red Carpet with the Rolling Stones

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Hartz, Newberry and Khaiyat

April 18, 2008

John Ross
The Bush Legacy: Losing Latin America

Dave Lindorff
Courage and Conviction: In Praise of Bill Ayers

Dan Glazebrook
An Interview with Robert Fisk

Carl Finamore
A Look Inside the Hangars

Rannie Amiri
J Street: Do We Really Need Another Pro-Israel Lobby?

Richard Morse
A Creepy Roadblock at Midnight

Ko Young-dae
CONPLAN 8022: Inside Bush's Nuclear War Plan for the Korean Peninsula

Farooq Sulehria
A Himalayan Surprise

April 17, 2008

Michael Hudson
Hillary Joins the Vast Rightwing Financial Conspiracy

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Apologists

Kathy Kelly
Weary of War? Don't Collaborate

Madis Senner
The Carrion Feeders' Ball: How Hedge Funds Reap Billions Off Economic Misery

Peter Morici
The G7, the Banks and GE

Ron Jacobs
Washington, al-Maliki and the Militias

William S. Lind
A Confirming Moment in Basra

James Murren
Obama's Disconnect with Small Town America

Ben Terrall
Losing Haiti

Walter Brasch
Political Log Rolling in Clinton County, PA

Website of the Day
Stealth Attack: Homegrown "Terrorism" Bill

April 16, 2008

Bill Kauffman
The Candidates from Nowhere

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Colonization and Massacres

Saul Landau
How to Leave Iraq

Peter Morici
McCain's Economic Plan: GOP Out of Ideas (But So are the Democrats)

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
Bankers Saved, Human Rights Sacrificed

Jeff Ballinger
Inside Nike's Asian Sweatshops: Squeezed Vietnamese Workers Strike Back

David Macaray
Union Strikes and Replacement Workers

Gary Leupp
Electoral Revolution in Nepal

Richard Morse
The Food Riots in Haiti

George Ciccariello-Maher
Einstein Turns in His Grave

Dave Lindorff
Letters from the Bitter Belt

Website of the Day
Surviving Prozac

April 15, 2008

Ralph Nader
The Politics of Distraction in an Age of Gotcha Capitalism

Uri Avnery
Manifest Destiny and Israel

Brian Cloughley
Arrogant Lies

David Price
Outrageous Pre-Tour de France Ban

Joe Bageant
Bitter America: Media Shit Storms and Heartland Reality

Steve Early
The Purple Punch-Out in Dearborn

Mats Svensson
To Create Something from Nothing: the Making of a Palestinian State

Michael Donnelly
Dead-Eye Hil and the Elitist

April Howard /
Benjamin Dangl
Dissecting the Politics of Paraguay's Next President

Laray Polk
Let's Not Put the Torch in a Bubble

Charles Modiano
What Does a Woman Have to Do to Get on the Cover of Sports Illustrated?

Website of the Day
The $3 Trillion Shopping Spree

April 14, 2008

Carl Finamore
Airline Deregulation Makes a Hard Landing

Michael Hudson
A Trillion Dollar Rescue for Wall Street Gamblers

M. Shahid Alam
Hizbullah's Big Win: Has Israel Finally Met Its Match?

Patrick Cockburn
A Cleric, a Pol and a Warrior

Paul Craig Roberts
Petraeus Sets Up Iran

Joanne Mariner
Redition to Jordan: What Happens When the Gloves Come Off?

Martha Rosenberg
Suicide and Cymbalta

Dave Lindorff
The Bitterness Thing: Is Obama Channeling Nader

P. Sainath
Hot Messages to Sex Dancer Doom Condi's New Finnish Pal

John V. Whitbeck
On Hypocrisy Over Tibet: a Personal Reflection

Website of the Day
Spying on Environmental Groups

April 12 / 13, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Olympic Torch Toasts US Candidates

Patrick Cockburn
Warlord: the Rise of Muqtada al-Sadr

Mike Whitney
Want to Save the Economy?

David Yearsley
Film Scores and Westerns: the Stealth Cavalry of Empire

Robert Fantina
Bush's Brand of Morality

Conn Hallinan
Another Defining Moment in Iraq

Bill Hatch
In Praise of Hippies and the Counter-Culture

Ramzy Baroud
The Basra Battles

George S. Hishmeh
Back to Square One

Ron Jacobs
The New New Left in Latin America

Nikolas Kozloff
Olympic Torch in Buenos Aires

Charles Thomson
The British Prime Minister and the Tate's Tin of Shit

Alexander Billet
The Disney-fication of CBGB

Missy Beattie
Huffing and Puffing to Failure

David Michael Green
America's Jones for War

Seth Sandronsky
Education Entrepreneurs

Prairie Miller
Meeting David Wilson

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Ko Un, Ibn Salma and Greaves

Website of the Weekend
Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights

April 11, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
The Clintons and Their Sordid Colombia Advocacy

Wajahat Ali
Revenge of the Ghetto Nerd: an Exclusive Interview with Junot Diaz

Sharon Smith
Let Them Eat Ethanol!

Yigal Bronner / Neve Gordon
Digging for Trouble: the Politics of Archaeology in East Jerusalem

Alan Farago
Eating South Florida

Dave Lindorff
On Waking Sleeping Giants: Lessons for America from China

George Wuerthner
Money for Nothing? The Problems with the Conservation Reserve Program

Christopher Brauchli
Prostitutes Don't Do Funerals

Website of the Day
Animals Explain the Insurance Industry: a Health Care Video

April 10, 2008

Mathieu Vernerey
Tibet for the Tibetans!

Elizabeth Schulte
Slavery in the Fields

David Macaray
Labor Unions Will Never Get a Fair Shake

Ashley Smith
The Rise of Muqtada al-Sadr

Peter Morici
Driving Up Debt and Dragging Down Growth

Jacob Hornberger
The Military's Distintegrating Family Life

Harold Austin
Snitch or Else: Prison Officials Threaten Gang Drop Outs

Website of the Day
Hillary: the Wal-Mart Videos

April 9, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
The Fading American Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Congressional Theater: the Petraeus / Crocker Hearings

C. Hand
Why Dave Marash Left Al Jazeera

Paul Krassner
Sex and Violins

Paul Wolf
Colombian "Magnicidio" Remains a Mystery After 60 Years

Wajahat Ali
Alien Invasion!

Karyn Strickler
Lost in the Fumes: the Sierra Club Sells Out to Clorox

Dan La Botz
Confronting the Economic Crisis

Eric Walberg
The Shadow of Munich: Another NATO Flop

Robin Millenthal
Enough Already! Growth and the Tar Sands Economy

Website of the Day
Conservative Nanny State

April 8, 2008

Mike Whitney
Should Khalid Sheikh Mohammed be Set Free?

Nikolas Kozloff
Bush Bullies Congress on Colombia Deal

Greg Moses
Migrant Detention in South Texas

Joshua Frank
The Other Military Draft

John Ross
Mexico City's Urban Tribes Go on the Warpath Against EMOS

Michael Donnelly
Hillary's Western Swing

John V. Walsh
Why Obama Lost Massachusetts

Jeff Nygaard
Health, Security and Mandates

Bill Piper
Last Shot for a Bush Legacy?

Sen. Russ Feingold
Legal Representation and the Death Penalty

Website of the Day
Catonsville 9, Forty Years Later

April 7, 2008

Ishmael Reed
The Irish Black Thing

Harry Browne
Irish Peace Activist Acquitted; Deported

Uri Avnery
Tibet and Palestine

Lenni Brenner
Obama's Constitution, His Pastor and His Unbelieving Mom in Heaven

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
America Must Respect Pakistan's Democracy

Robert Fisk
Fearful Lives in the Land of the Free

Edwin Krales
Ensuring the Success of Fascism in Spain: the US Corporate Role

Chris Genovali
Vancouver Island's Dwindling Ancient Forests

Website of the Day
LA Artists Against War

April 5 / 6, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Did the Elites Want MLK Dead?

Ramzy Baroud
There are No Checkpoints in Heaven

Ralph Nader
Runaway Bailouts

David Yearsley
How Scott Joplin Had Wall Street Down

Saul Landau
Sex Politics in America

Paul Craig Roberts
The Petraeus and Crocker Show

Lawrence Korb / Ian Moss
Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a True Patriot

Seth Sandronsky
Meet America's Promise Alliance: Colin Powell's New Gig

John Ross
La Cumbia de la Doctrina Bush: Colombia Kills Four Mexican Students in Ecuador Bombing

Robert Fantina
McCain, Republicans and Family Values

David Michael Green
Back to Disaster: Hoover at Home, Tet Abroad

Missy Beattie
McCan't

Patrick Bond
Vultures Circle Zimbabwe

Dr. Susan Block
The New American Pot Dealers

Phyllis Pollack
The Stones Meet the Press

Adam Engel
The Boobus in the Lie

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Diamand and St. Clair

Website of the Weekend
Richard Pryor Goes to the Gun Shop

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Three NAFTA Leaders Sit In for the Last Time

Bad Jazz in New Orleans

By JOHN ROSS

New Orleans.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon was not having a good day. His plan to arrive in New Orleans for the NAFTA Summit April 21-22 with a freshly minted law privatizing Mexico's oil industry in his pocket had been foiled by the opposition's takeover of congress.  Now after repeatedly  promising his U.S. backers that privatizing was a done deal, he was flying up the Gulf empty-handed.  Moreover, the Mexican Congress had waited until the last minute to grant him permission to travel to New Orleans.  He practically had to beg for the permission, an acute embarrassment to Calderon, more than half of whose compatriots do not think he was legitimately elected president. 

Just to add to the bad juju, the mariachis who were selected to welcome Felipe Calderon at Louis Armstrong International Airport had been stopped by Homeland Security and stripped of their instruments.  The six members of the Mariachi Mexico Tipico who had motored over from Houston for the occasion in their wide sequined sombreros and tight silver-studded pants, waited disconsolately outside of the barricaded terminal for the return of their violins, guitars, and guitarones. 

In their stead, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, that venerable posse of oldsters, were assembled on the tarmac to tootle "When The Saints Go Marching In" when the Mexican president's plane touched down - it wasn't "Caminos de Michoacan", Calderon's favorite mariachi tune, but it would have to do.

Although still seriously scarred three years after Hurricane Katrina struck home, the cradle of jazz was chosen to play host to the fourth Summit of North American Leaders and the last one with Bush on board.  Indeed, the U.S. president was returning to the scene of his greatest disaster (arguably - there have been so many) hauling a wagonload of bad baggage.  Bush's ratings have plummeted to the lowest ever for an outgoing U.S. head of state and over 62% of the American public consider his presidency a catastrophe, according to a consensus of the polls.

The Great Slide had, in fact, begun right here in the Big Easy August 29, 2005 with his government's failure to respond to the devastation wrought by Katrina.  Still, George Bush was back in town hell bent on defending NAFTA from its many detractors and even if the huddle with Calderon and Canada's Stephen Harper was going to be more protocol than substance, at least he'd get a chance to practice his bad Spanish on Felipe. 

NAFTA is back in the news after a 14-year absence in which no one paid any attention whatsoever to the millions of workers and farmers on both sides of the border decrying the deprivations that the trade treaty has dumped upon them.  But in recent weeks, the dueling Dem frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been barnstorming rust belt states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana where NAFTA impacts are poignant - during the Pennsylvania campaign, the Hershey Corporation, the nation's most emblematic chocolate maker, announced it was moving hundreds of production jobs from its Hershey Pennsylvania plant to Mexico - and renegotiating the trade treaty has become a hot button campaign issue.

Both Obama and Hillary are vying to show who hates NAFTA the most.  Hillary harps on how Mexico, where the average wage is 13  per cent that of the U.S. average wage, has been cheating on environmental and labor standards, thus putting American workers at an unfair disadvantage, and promises to renegotiate the trade agreement within her first hundred days as president, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it was her spouse who had, in fact, drawn up the labor and environmental side agreements that nudged NAFTA through the U.S. Congress in the first place. 

Actually, Hillary and Bill Clinton owe their years in the White House to the North American Free Trade Agreement - if Texas tycoon H. Ross Perot had not tossed his cap into the ring back in '92 running against the trade treaty and its "giant sucking sound" and rustling 19 per cent of the vote from the first Bush, the Clintons would never have gotten to sleep in the White House.

Obama too has committed  [unless you take seriously what his top economic advisor told  Canadian diplomats, Eds] to renegotiate NAFTA at the earliest opportunity.  On the other side of the aisle, presumptive Republican candidate John McCain is as big a NAFTA booster as Bush.

Mexico's Calderon is also plagued by demands to renegotiate the TLCAN (its Spanish initials) with particular focus on the agricultural chapters.  With the elimination of all tariffs on 200 key agricultural products, including corn, beans, and sugar this past January 1, Mexico's farmers are facing a desperate future and tens of thousands of protesters marched up to Mexico City this winter, driving their tractors and their cattle through the capital's streets. 

Calderon responds by defending the TLCAN and stonewalling the scoffers.  NAFTA has brought boom times, the president counters, commerce has multiplied 25 times since 1994 (the U.S. economy is 25 times bigger than Mexico's.)  But the bald truth is that only a handful of transnationals have harvested the benefits of increased trade and the income divide south of the border is now wider than what it was 14 years ago.  Despite promises that increased job opportunities would end out migration to the U.S., 10 per cent fewer  manufacturing workers are employed in Mexico in 2008 than when the treaty kicked in and the escalating displacement of Mexico's small farmers, pushed off the land by NAFTA corn imports, has increased migration to El Norte. 

Yet, despite the negatives, Bush and Calderon and their northern neighbor Harper insist now is not the time to tamper with the trade treaty.  What they mean is that there will never be a time to renegotiate NAFTA.

Although the North American Free Trade Agreement has made rich men richer, the poor are about to get much poorer thanks to the TLCAN.  As the dark night of recession descends over the United States, NAFTA serves as a transmitter of the bad news.  The sinking economy means canceled inventories and orders and what manufacturing - read, "maquiladora" - jobs that haven't already fled to China in this no-win race to the bottom, are about to dry up.  As employment sags north of the border, remittances from El Norte, Mexico's second source of dollars raking in $20 billion USD a year, could be reduced by as much as a third, according to Inter-American Development Bank (BID) estimates.  With 90 per cent  of its exports destined for U.S. markets, Mexico's immediate future is dimming every day.  Predicted growth hovers around an anemic 2 per cent, a rate that doesn't keep pace with population growth.  Not unsurprisingly, the fall-out from the U.S. nose-dive softens the further south the money goes.  While Mexico is paralyzed, thrumming Latin American economies like Venezuela and Brazil will shrug off the recession.

Technically speaking, the New Orleans jamboree was mounted under the banner of NAFTA Plus - the so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, better known by its Spanish language acronym ASPAN. The ASPAN looks past free trade to the integration of security apparati and energy resources amongst the three "North American" nations. High-level cabinet ministers accompanied their bosses to New Orleans for a series of hush-hush bi-lateral head knockings.  ASPAN negotiations are not open to public scrutiny or congressional oversight. 

The Calderon party had hardly landed when Homeland Security chieftain Michael Chertoff whisked Felipe's Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mourino off to hash out Mexico's role in the Bush terror war.  Agreement was announced on setting up a biometric database of all travelers, visa applicants, and passport holders entering the U.S. from Mexico.  Moneys for the database will be drawn down from the White House's $1.4 billion USD Plan Mexico (AKA the Merida Initiative), a clone of Plan Colombia, that would equip and train repressive Mexican security forces cited by international human rights organizations as responsible for myriad human rights violations.  Plan Mexico transfers, funding for which has not yet cleared the U.S. Congress, include dozens of second-hand helicopters and used transportation carriers plus cutting edge technological tools to eavesdrop on every Mexican's telephone and e-mail communications. 

Plan Mexico is the latest White House strategy to annex Mexico's security apparatus, the so-called "third link" first proposed during the Reagan years.  Mexico is regarded as the U.S.'s southern security perimeter under the purview of the North Command, the Colorado-based command center charged with protecting U.S. mainland from potential terrorist threats.  One goal of the Security and Prosperity Partnership is to legitimatize U.S. troop deployment on Mexican soil to combat hypothetical threats to the United States. 

On the energy front, NAFTA Plus integration translates to "what's yours is mine" but the Bush White House's vision of a privatized Mexican oil industry to guarantee continued supply (1.5 million barrels a day) and even bigger profits for Big Oil has temporarily been blunted by a Mexican opposition led by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. 

The future of Washington's troubled bi-lateral Free Trade Agreement with Colombia was much on Bush's mind down in New Orleans.  Accusing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of "killing" the deal (Pelosi has offered to bring the FTA to the floor if Bush yields on a new stimulus package and extending unemployment benefits for recession ravaged U.S. workers), the outgoing U.S. president enlisted Harper and Calderon's condemnation of his Democratic rivals. 

Charging the Dems with encouraging narco-terror and building up Hugo Chavez's evil empire, Bush exalted Colombian president Alvaro Uribe as a paragon of democracy.  Ironically, at the very hour the lame duck U.S. president held forth in the Big Easy, Bogotá police were rounding up Uribe's cousin, Mario, the former president of the Colombian senate, for conspiring with paramilitary death squads in 1997 to massacre peasants.  Alvaro Uribe himself is under investigation for his role in the killings. 

Licking Bush's boots and glad-handing the big business bigwigs (Ford, Wal-mart, Campbell Soup, the North American Competiveness Council) who always converge on these klatches, Felipe Calderon couldn't even spare a second for the obligatory stroll through the French Quarter. Indeed, outside of the tourist-infested Quarter, there isn't much to see in New Orleans three years after Katrina ripped it apart. 

Population is down to 200,000 from a half million on the morning the storm struck.  The forced exodus of black workers has not been compensated by the invasion of profit-driven Caucasians.  Thousands are still living in Formaldehyde filled FEMA trailers (they have a May 31st eviction date) and 10,000 units of usable public housing are being demolished to make way for global real estate moguls like Donald Trump.  Row after row of rotting, abandoned homes are mute testimony to the national disgrace that is the Lower Ninth Ward.  National Guard Humvees still patrol the streets.          

In contrast, since Katrina, the Mexican community in New Orleans has more than doubled to 83,000 (27,000 in neighboring Mississippi.)  Many were trucked in by subcontractors paying bottom line wages (if the workers got paid at all) for shoddy reconstruction scams.  Now the indocumentados line up mornings in the Home Depot parking lots waiting for day work and undercutting black workers in the local job market, which has ratcheted up racial tensions.  "The Mexs work for less than the niggers,"  Steve Jennings, a cab driver, comments to his passenger. 

New Orleans has been the destination for displaced Mexicans for a couple of centuries.  Mexican brass bands are said to be an inspiration for New Orleans marching bands.  Mexico opened its first consulate here in 1824, just three years after liberation from Spain.  In fact, Calderon took advantage of his visit to re-inaugurate the New Orleans consulate closed down in 2002 because of budget cuts.

The Mexican president's sojourn here suffered one final embarrassment when a Calderon travel official with the same name as the most celebrated drug lord in Mexico, Rafael Quintero, was charged with the theft of a half dozen cell phones and Blackberries that U.S. officials had left outside a closed door tete a tete with their NAFTA Plus counterparts.  Captured in flagrante on video, the U.S. Secret Service chased Quintero all the way to the New Orleans airport where he claimed diplomatic immunity.  Whether the cell phones contained information that compromised either Calderon or Bush has yet to be revealed.

The Security and Prosperity Partnership junta was countered by the New Orleans Peoples' Summit, which sought to draw attention to the city's woeful situation.  Demonstrators could not get near the Windsor Court Hotel where the junta was held but a Bush downtown drive-through drew heavy jeers from disgruntled ironworkers on a nearby construction site, according to a report in the Baton Rouge Observer.

Unlike previous North American leadership summits, no triumphal announcements or high-flying hype topped off the New Orleans soiree which seemingly was designed more to enhance Bush's legacy in the last months of his regime than to produce tangible agreements. 

Or was the Summit itself a pretext for another agenda?  For months, right-wing talk show mouthpieces and conspiracy-minded bloggers have been ballyhooing the Security and Prosperity Partnership meet as setting the table for a North American Union, akin to the European Union, with one currency and one flag and no borders - Mexico would get back the U.S. southwest under this fanciful plot. 

Although the White House took great pains to debunk the hypothesis as an extremist pipedream, who knows what exactly was being negotiated behind locked doors or over the prawn etouffee at the pricey Commander's Palace?  Given the duplicity of the leaders of North America a denial invariably means that a deal is in the works.

Do you have connections in the publishing industry? Would they like to read John Ross's riveting unpublished short novel "The History of Latin America, A Novella"? Contact johnross@igc.org for further instructions.