Today's Stories

July 17-19, 2009

Nikolas Kozloff
Chiquita in Latin America: From Arbenz to Zelaya

July 16, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
What Economy?

Afshin Rattansi Iranian Planes and the Hidden Toll of Economic Sanctions

Gregory V. Button
The Search for Environmental Justice in Perry County, Alabama

Evan Knappenberger
Profile of a Deserter

Michelle Bollinger
Why is Leonard Peltier Still in Prison?

Russell Mokhiber
White House to ABC News: No Obama Single-Payer Doc

Belén Fernández
Iranian Penetration, Oh My!

Alice Walker
What is Torture Like? A Letter to Obama

Nicholas Dearden
Paying the Climate Debt: the G-8's Troubling Model

Albert Osueke
Sotomayor and the Identity Mountain

Website of the Day
Sotomayor for the Prosecution

July 15, 2009

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Assassination Bureau

Vijay Prashad
A Political Recession

Dean Baker
Stimulus Arithmetic

Ray McGovern
Cheney Sweating Bullets

Jonathan Cook
Jenin's Model of "Economic Peace"

David Rosen
Shouts From the Gallery: the Sotomayor Hearings and the Culture Wars

Eric Walberg
Uighurs vs. Afghans: a Study in Contrast

Greg Moses
Three Dimensions of a Complete Stimulus Plan

Sousan Hammad
Decolonizing Israel

Binoy Kampmark
The Trial of Charles Taylor

Tracy McLellan
The Story of My Arrest

Website of the Day
11 Days in Saudi Gitmo

July 14, 2009

Eamonn McCann
The Emperors of Bombast: Bono, U2 and the Crisis of World Capitalism

Joanne Mariner
Obama's New Euphemism

Franklin Spinney
The Taliban Rope-a-Dope

Steve Heilig
Walking Mount Tam: an Interview with Gary Snyder

Ali Abunimah
Hamas' Choice

Dave Lindorff
The End of "Nice" Health Care Reform

Nikolas Kozloff
The Politics of Destabilization: McCain and Honduras

Ellen Brown
From Golden State to Subprime State

Alice Slater
How US Missile Defense Plans Sabotaged Nuclear Disarmament Talks With Russia

Ron Jacobs
Protest U.S. Aggression

Joe Allen
The Fight to Save James Hickman in Jim Crow-Style Chicago

Website of the Day
Mel Brooks Does the French Revolution

July 13, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Essence of the Regime

Mike Whitney
The Deflating Economy

P. Sainath
How the World Depression Hits Orissa

Gareth Porter
A US / Iraq Conflict on Iran

Paul Moore
Rap in the Streets, Rap in the Suites

Tim Wise
Off the Deep End: Private Clubs, Public Prejudice

Andy Worthington Former Insider Shatters Credibility of Military Commissions

David Macaray
Cartoon Voices: Serf's Up in Hollywood

Cal Winslow
The Healthcare Worker War

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Spring in the Time of Obama

Website of the Day
Washington's Deep Game with China

July 10-12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Biden Problem

José Pertierra
The Cuban Five: a Cold War Case in a Post-Cold War World

John Ross
After the Honduran Coup

Conn Hallinan
The Settlements and the Quartet

Nikolas Kozloff
C Street Band: Sex Scandals, Moral Hypocrisy and the Far Right Agenda in Latin America

Clifton Ross /
Marcy Rein
U.S. and Honduras: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Good Neighbor

Carl Ginsburg
Summers' Clouded Crystal Ball

Michael Neumann
Say It Loud, Say It Proud: There is No God!

Gilad Atzmon
The Left and Islam: Thinking Outside of the Secular Box

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Parable of the Golden Parachute

Ellen Hodgson Brown
California Dreamin': How the State Can Beat Its Budget Woes

Jim Goodman
Rural America Needs More Than Listening Sessions

Christopher Bickerton
Europe's New Politics of Hard Times

Wendell Potter
Health Care Industry Adopts Tobacco Lobby's Tactics

Dave Lindorff
CIA Lies: Why Isn't Congress in Open Revolt?

David Ker Thomson
Switchbacking Toward Bastille Day

Anthony DiMaggio
The Michael Jackson Feeding Frenzy

Raymond Lawrence
Michael Jackson as Sexual Pervert: the Calumnies of Peter King

Walid El Houri
Neda and Marwa: a Tale of Two Murdered Women

Stephanie Westbrook
Yes, We Camp

Roger Gaess
The Shades of Highgate Cemetery

David Yearsley
Tara, America's Dream House

Kim Nicolini
Caution: Men at Work, Robbing Banks

Poets' Basement
Five Poems From the Japanese

Website of the Weekend
Free Tiga and Hugh!

July 9, 2009

Ronnie Cummings
How Industry Giants are Undermining the Organic Foods Movement

Jonathan Cook
Two-State Solution, Israeli-Style

Nikolas Kozloff
Honduran Destablization, Inc.: Otto Reich and the International Republican Institute

James Bovard
McNamara's Other Body Count

Norman Solomon Afghanistan: the Escalation Scam

Allan Nairn
Indonesia Gets to Pick Its Killer

Andy Worthington
Revamping the Military Commissions

Tomas Borge
The Sadsack Soldiers of Honduras

Nadia Hijab
Palestinian Titanic

Paul Krassner
How Jeff Goldblum Didn't Die

Website of the Day
Dave Lindorff Wants Your Money--Will Give Good Reports

July 8, 2009

Saul Landau
In Amazonia

Dean Baker
The Green Shoots are Dead: Why the Economy Needs a Third Stimulus

Winslow T. Wheeler
Gates, Congress and the F-22

Eric Walberg
Obama in Russia

Ray McGovern
Is Texas Harboring a Torture Decider?

David Rosen
When Sadism Goes Systematic: Prison Rape as Policy

Dr. Mona El Farra
Gaza From a Distance

Ron Jacobs
McNamara and the Post: When Idiocy and Hubris Merge

Benjamin Dangl
High Stakes in Honduras

Alan Farago
How I Almost Pitched McNamara Into the Sea

Website of the Day
Ayatollah So

July 7, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
McNamara: From the Tokyo Firestorm to the World Bank

Uri Avnery
Israeli Court Rebukes Military

Brian M. Downing
Crossing the Helmand

Gary Leupp
Biden, Israel and Iran

Gregory A. Burris
My Brush With Homeland Security

David Macaray
When in Doubt, Blame a Labor Union

Laura Flanders
Obama Hushes Health Care Advocates

Alan Farago
Princple Over Principal

Greg Moses
Texas Patels Take Over Dallas Bank

Dan Bacher
Three Big Lies About the Peripheral Canal

Website of the Day
Tragedy at Toncontin

July 6, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Hussein's FBI Interviews

Diana Johnstone
Zionist Fanatics Practice Serial Vandalism in Paris

Nikolas Kozloff
Honduran Coup to Venezuelan Coup: Same Old Globalizers and Torture School Grads

Gary Leupp
Operation Khanjar Begins

Jonathan Cook
Israel Calls on Ultra-Orthodox Jews to Stop "Arab Takeover"

Tim Wise
Of Fireworks and False Memories

Franklin Lamb
Cynthia McKinney and the Kidnapping of the Spirit of Humanity

Charles R. Larson
Sarah Palin, Plain and Tall

Carlos Benemann
California's Bingo Bondage: Getting Paid in IOUs

Shepherd Bliss
The Soulless Machine: Caught in the Cellphone Snare

Jerry Kroth
Stuart Levey and World War III

Karyn Strickler
A Fell-Swoop Moment Missed

Website of the Day
The Rise in Military-Backed Public Schools

July 3-5, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Gob Smacked

Eamonn Fingleton
Detroit's Collapse: the Untold Story

Jeffrey St. Clair
Is the Bald Eagle Really Back?

Mike Whitney
Running on Empty

Pam Martens
The Parable of Michael Jackson's Debts

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Counter-Revolution Will Not be Tweeted

Paul Craig Roberts
The Big Whorehouse on the Potomac

Patrick Cockburn
The Haggling Over Iraqi Oil

Anthony DiMaggio
A Perilous Path: Iraq and the Language of De-Escalation

Roger Burbach
Honduran Coup: Target Left?

John Ross
Left's Grip on Mexico City Slips

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet Jim Demint: Coup Apologist

Gareth Porter
The Iran Canard

Andy Worthington
Finally, a Trial Date in the African Embassy Bombings Case

Saul Landau
Bad Times, Worse Habits

David Macaray
How We Spend Our Money

Adam Federman
The Recovery That Wasn't

Jane Slaughter Labor's Vague Rally for Health Care

Russell Mokhiber Black Caucus Muzzled on Israeli Kidnapping of McKinney

Robert Jensen
Beyond Independence

Robert Bryce
Hey, Paul Krugman, Here are 2.4 Billion More Climate Traitors

Belén Fernandez
The Situation in Honduras

Missy Comley Beattie
Would Jesus Pack Heat?

C. G. Estabrook
La Cina e Vicina

Stephen Martin
The Fog of Economic War

Charles R. Larson
Adichie on Her Own

Lorenzo Wolff
A Voice Like a Newsreel: the Soul of James Carr and the Civil Rights Movement

Kim Nicolini
The System That Hijacked New York

Poets' Basement
Farrelly, Kazak and Stadler

Website of the Weekend
Paul Krassner v. Larry King

July 2, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
The Wall Street White House

Nikolas Kozloff
Spinning the Honduran Coup

Wendell Potter
Obama's False Friends of Health Care Reform

Ellen Hodgson Brown
California's Empty Wallet

Christian Christensen Iran: Networked Dissent?

Patrick Irelan
Lost in Patagonia

Binoy Kampmark Returning Iraq

Nicola Nasser
Ethnic Cleansing as State Policy

Brian Tokar
Climate Bill: Cap(italize) and Trade(Off)

Dan Bacher
Panama Canal North?

Website of the Day
Scheuer on Immigration: "The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States."

July 1, 2009

Vijay Prashad
Iran and Us

Alberto Vallente Thorensen
Why Zelaya's Actions Were Legal

Paul Craig Roberts
Pirates of the Mediterranean

Robert Weissman
150 Years

Manuel García, Jr.
The New Crisis in Aviation

Victor Figueroa-Clark / Pablo Navarrete
Honduras, a Coup With No Future

Norman Solomon
The NYT and Troop Deaths: Abstract Quality Journalism

Franklin Lamb
Remembering Amnon Kapeliouk

Martha Rosenberg
When Doctors Boo

Diane Rejman
Mothers and Military Lies

Website of the Day
The Color of the Race Problem is White

June 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Debt Deflation Arrives

Esam Al-Amin
Iran and Washington's Hidden Hand

Benjamin Dangl
Showdown in Honduras

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Doctors Collude in Torture

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah After the Elections

George Wuerthner
Beetle Hysteria ... Again: the Truth About Bugs, Fires and Ecosystems

Todd Gordon
Acceptable Versus Unacceptable Repression

Ron Jacobs
Mark Sanford, Sexual Liberation and LGBT Equality

Kenneth Libby
Conditions for Citizenship

Julian Vigo
Feeling Michael Jackson

Website of the Day
Inside the Mega-Churches

June 29, 2009

Ishmael Reed
The Persecution of Michael Jackson

Nikolas Kozloff
The Coup in Honduras: Obama's Real Message to Latin America?

Clifton Ross
Coups and Constitutions: From Bolivia to Honduras

Patrick Cockburn
Why Iraq is Now the Most Corrupt Country on the Planet

Uri Avnery
Between Tel Aviv and Tehran

Conn Hallinan
Dealing With North Korea: Why Threats and Sanctions Will Backfire

James G. Abourezk
Where the Money Isn't Going

Ralph Nader
The Holes in Obama's Financial Regulation Plan

Carol Miller
Why Fiscal Conservatives Should Love Medicare-for-All

Greg Moses
Jobs First

Website of the Day
Key Leaders of Honduran Coup Trained in the US

June 26-28, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Hate Crimes Bill: How Not to Remember Matthew Shepard

Jeffrey St. Clair
Meet the Retreads: Obama's Used Green Team

Doug Peacock
Elk River: History and the Yellowstone

Daniel Wolff
The Night Before: a Glimpse of the Lenape

Mike Whitney
What the Big Banks Have Won

John Ross
The New York Times and Stolen Elections

David Rosen
Cry, Hypocrite, Cry: the Tradition of Sex Scandals and American Politicians

Emily Ratner
Thoughts on Manhood From the Rafah Tunnel

Gareth Porter
Airstrike Report Belies "Blame Taliban" Line

Farid Marjai
Green, But Not Velvet

Nadia Hijab
The Rift in Iran: Memo to the "Do Something" Brigade

Paul Craig Roberts
Gun Control: What's the Agenda?

Fred Gardner
FDR's Real Defining Moment: Ending Prohibition

Carl Ginsburg
Obama's Father's Day

Paul Watson
Fear and Loathing in Madeira

David Ker Thomson
Nothing

Farzana Versey
The Man in the Mirror: Michael Jackson as Tramp

Geoff Berne
Obama and Charter Schools: The Showdown at Schottenstein

Todd Alan Price
Ohio: Birthplace of Charter Education ... and Opposition to It

Ramzy Baroud
People for Sale in a Hungry World

Jeff Sher
Health Care Showdown

Dr. Carol Paris Despite My Arrest by Max Baucus, I Will Continue to Advocate for Quality Health Care for All

Walter Brasch Adultery as Family Value?

Glen Johnson
The Village and the Wall

Charlotte Laws
Hold the MSG!

Charles R. Larson
Dickens in Morocco, Sort Of

Kim Nicolini
The Erasure of Art

David Yearsley
Yankee Prof Takes on Dallas

Lorenzo Wolff
When the Songs Remain the Same

Poets' Basement
Larson, Davies, McLellan and Gardner

Website of the Weekend
Kayakers vs. Shell Oil

June 25, 2009

Kathy Kelly
Now We See You, Now We Don't

Jack Bratich
You Provide the Tweets, We'll Provide the Info War: the Media and the Iranian Protests

Wendell Potter
The Health Insurance Industry v. Health Care Reform: a Former Insurance Industry Insider Tells All

Charles R. Larson
Don't Cry for Him, Argentina! GOP Sex Scandal of the Week

Alan Farago
The Tears of Mark Sanford

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Firms Accused of Profiting Off Holocaust

Gareth Porter
Khobar Bombings: Telltale Signs of Saudi Fraud

Bitta Mostofi /
Bill Quigley
"You Will Not Get Past Us"

David Macaray
Six Ways to Reinvigorate Labor

Mark Schuller
Haiti's Elections: "Beat the Dog Too Hard"

Website of the Day
Worst Slide Story

June 24, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
How the U.S. Has Secretly Backed Pakistan's Nuclear Program From Day One

Dean Baker
Making Financial Regulation Work

Andy Worthington
The Story of Abdul Rahim al-Ginco

James Bovard
Obama and the Torturers

Diana Gibson /
Ray McGovern
Torture Eats the Soul

P. Sainath
The Age of the Everyday Billionaire

Gareth Porter
Investigating the Khobar Tower Bombing: Why Was Al Qaeda Excluded From the Suspects List?

Robert Alvarez
The Department of Energy's Nuclear Albatross

Dave Lindorff
Medicare for All

Steven Colatrella Remembering Giovanni Arrighi

Website of the Day
Protest as Terrorism

June 23, 2009

David Price
Obama's Classroom Spies

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reels Toward a New Era

James Ridgeway /
Jean Casella
Bi-Partisan Bull on Health Care: Three Ex-Senators Get It Up for the Health Care Industry

Dave Lindorff
Using the Economic Crisis to Attack Workers

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
Puerto Rico: Biotech Island

Gary Leupp
Dennis Ross Moves to the White House

Brian M. Downing
The Erosion of the Mullahs' Monolith

Robert Bryce
Are Theocracies Doomed?

Nicholas Dearden
The G8 is Dead

Yousef Munayyer
Seeing Through Israeli Delay Tactics

Website of the Day
The Great White Father of America

June 22, 2009

Michael Hudson
Obama's (Latest) Surrender to Wall Street

Esam Al-Amin
What Actually Happened in the Iranian Presidential Election? A Hard Look at the Numbers

Chris Floyd
Dexter's Legions in Afghanistan

Jack Z. Bratich
The Fog Machine: Iran, Social Networks and Genetically Modified Grassroots Organizations

Atash Yaghmaian
We Children of the Revolution

Laura Carlsen
Victory in the Amazon

Paul Craig Roberts
The U.S. Regime-Change Recipe for Iran

Vijay Prashad
Gun v. Butter: Now You are Only Poor

Fred Gardner
Charles Lynch Gets a Year and a Day (No Thanks to Eric Holder)

Andy Thayer
The Blank Check: How We Got the Obama-DOMA Debacle

David Macaray
Unions and the Newspaper Crisis

Website of the Day
The Most Spied Upon Town in America?

June 19 - 21, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
I Become an American

Jeffrey St. Clair
Firebrand: Rod Coronado's Flame War

Patrick Cockburn
Who Will Control Iraq's Oil?

Al Giordano
What the Left Should be Learning From Iran

Henry A. Giroux
The Iranian Uprisings and the Challenge of the New Media

Anthony DiMaggio
The Electoral Façade

Paul Craig Roberts
Are the Iranian Protests Another US Orchestrated "Color Revolution?"

John Ross
46 Dead Mexican Toddlers: Sacrificed on the Altar of Neoliberalism

Gareth Porter
Spinning Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan

Carl Ginsburg
Obama's Bix Fix: Placating the Bankers, Again

Tommi Avicolli Mecca
40 Years After Stonewall: From Smash the Church to Going to the Chapel

Joe Bageant
Workers' Rights: No Balls, No Gains

Serge Halimi
Protectionism: We've Been Here Before

P. Sainath
Price of Rice, Price of Power in India

Jim Goodman
The Claim Deniers: Why the Health Insurance Industry Doesn't Deserve Our Trust

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Health Care Waterloo

Rannie Amiri
Bush Jumps Over Maine, Carter Lands in Gaza

Robert Fantina
Iran, Obama and McCain

Harvey Wasserman
Big Nuke's Radioactive Hoax in Impoverished Ohio

Walter Brasch
They Got Away With Murder: 12 Angry White People

David Ker Thomson
This Moment's Bill of Rights

Charles R. Larson
No Voice: Telling Her Mother's Story

David Yearsley
Escape From the Torture Chamber

Kim Nicolini
When the Closet is the Culprit

Ben Sonnenberg
Rossellini and the Art of Ambiguity

Poets' Basement
Beatty and Kowitt

Website of the Weekend
Grown in Yellowstone, Slaughtered in Montana

Weekend Edition
July 17-19, 2009

The Dinosaur is Back

Jurassic Fallout in Mexico

By JOHN ROSS

Mexico City.

Nine years ago on a sultry July morning, Mexicans woke up and discovered to their great amazement that the Dinosaur that had hunkered down at the foot of their beds for 71 years was gone. This July 6th, when Mexicans rose in the morning, the Dinosaur was back.

In the famous short poem by Augusto Monterroso, the Dinosaur is the PRI - the Institutional Revolutionary Party - once the longest-ruling political dynasty in the known universe that controlled the destiny of Mexicans from the cradle to the grave for seven interminable decades until it was dislodged from power by the right-wing PAN party in the July 2000 presidential elections. In its unslakable thirst for power, the PRI committed unspeakable crimes against the Mexican peoples, stealing elections from the most humble city hall to the presidential palace, jailing and torturing and executing those who stood in its way, and emptying out public treasuries in an unmatched kleptocracy that was a legend throughout Latin America, "the perfect dictatorship" Latin American novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once dubbed it (for which the PRI had him tossed out of the country.)

"Have we Mexicans lost our memories and our minds?" asks Sylvia Insulza from behind the counter of her newspaper dispensary in the old quarter of the capital. Tears of frustration crystallize in the corners of her eyes.

The depth and breadth of the PRI victory July 5th is nothing short of stunning. From a distant third place finish in the 2006 presidential fiasco in which the rightist PAN stole the election from Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) and his left-wing PRD party by .57% of the popular vote, the PRI ("proven experience and a new attitude" is its current campaign slogan) took 37% of the total ballots cast, nearly doubling its votes three years back, and taking control of congress for the first time since 1997. The once-upon-a-time ruling party's alliance with the so-called Mexican Green Environmental Party (PVEM - see sidebar below "THE GREEN PRI") will give it 259 seats out of 500 in the lower house, an absolute majority. In nine out of 31 states, the PRI won every office up for grabs - federal congressional representatives, local congresses, and municipal officials, a "carro completo" or "full car" in the Institutionals' curious lexicon.

The Dinosaurs also proved triumphant in five out of six governors' races, winning two statehouses in which the PAN had resided for 12 years. Only in the northern border state of Sonora where the PRI governor was seen as complicit in the tragic incineration of 48 babies in a Hermosillo day care center a month before the election, was the PAN able to squeeze out a victory in an election in which the PAN and PRI candidates were cousins.

Moreover, the PRI won cities like Naucalpan, an upper middle class Mexico City suburb the right-wingers have controlled since the 1980s, and the nation's second city, Guadalajara, which the PAN has owned since 1995. In alliance with the Mexican Green Environmental Party, the PRI won its first elected office in Mexico City since 1994. Although the left PRD maintains control of the nation's capital, the Party of the Aztec Sun does so by a greatly reduced margin. Whereas the PRD registered 51% of the vote in Mexico City in 2006, three years later it weighs in with just 29%.

But Sylvia's tears of frustration may soon dry. Whether the Dinosaurs are really back or just staying overnight (in Jurassic time) is not yet clear. Mid-term elections are referendums on the sitting president and his administration's management of the country and July 5th represented a crushing vote of no confidence in Felipe Calderon on whose watch the economy has tumbled into freefall - "growth" in 2009 will measure a negative 8%, the worst slide since the Great Depression of 1929-32. Calderon, who campaigned as the "President of Employment" has presided over the loss of 2,000,000 jobs. The president's ill-advised war on the drug cartels has soaked the country in blood - over 12,000 lives have been lost - and fueled corruption and human rights abuses on the part of the military and the police. Calderon's panic-driven handling of this spring's Swine Flu "PAN-demic" kicked the bricks out from under the tourist industry, the nation's third source of dollars, and his arrogant imposition of candidates in the July 5th vote-taking angered and turned many in his own party against him.

Ceding the PRI a 10-point advantage (37% to 27%) in the national vote and the loss of congress to the Institutionals' absolute majority effectively shuts down Calderon's legislative agenda. Indeed the PANista may be the weakest president in a century - no Mexican president since the 1910-1919 revolution has ever ruled with the opposition holding an absolute majority in the lower house. Felipe Calderon will be a lame duck for the next three years - in real terms, his presidency ended July 5th.

One of the first casualties of the debacle was PAN party president German Martinez, a creature of Calderon, who tossed in the towel the morning after his party's most devastating defeat since its founding in 1939. Similar demands for the resignation of PRD president Jesus "Chucho" Ortega, who orchestrated the left party's worst showing since 1991, are legion.

The Party of the Aztec Sun plummeted from 38% of the national vote in 2006 when Lopez Obrador was at the top of the ticket, to just 12% three years later and its congressional delegation was decimated, retaining only 71 seats out of the 126 it held in the outgoing legislature. Cities in the misery belt girdling the capital such as Nezahualcoyotl, Chalco, and Ecatepec with a total population of 6,00,000 that have been in the PRD's pocket for years fell to the Dinosaurs.

Despite hanging on to its hegemony in the capital, the PRD lost four out of 16 delegations or boroughs for the first time since it took power here in 1997 although the leftists still have a commanding advantage in the local legislative assembly. In the battles for the delegations, the PAN picked up three of the wealthiest enclaves in the city and the tiny Party of Labor won the megalopolis's biggest and poorest demarcation - Iztapalapa - by ten points after Ortega and his co-conspirators persuaded the nation's top electoral court to substitute their candidate at the last minute for one supported by Lopez Obrador.

AMLO responded by mobilizing his considerable base, including the "Adelitas", hundreds of working women dressed in the outfits of women soldiers during the Mexican revolution, who last year fended off the privatization of the state oil monopoly PEMEX with a campaign of civil disobedience. "Adelitas" like Berta Robledo, a retired nurse, descended on Iztapalapa walking the precincts day after day to expose the flimflam and support Lopez Obrador's candidate, a local soccer coach everyone knows as "Juanito." Now, with Iztapalapa under his belt, AMLO, the once-wildly popular Mexico City mayor who still styles himself as "the legitimate president of Mexico", has forcibly demonstrated that he is still very much a factor in Mexican electoral politics.

Despite the PRI Dinosaur's big numbers, it was the Party of No that was the hands- down winner July 5th. Absenteeism hovered between 55 and 60% in the south and center of the country and in northern states like Chihuahua and Baja California where Calderon's drug war rages, only 25 to 30% of the electorate went to the polls. A national movement to cast protest votes or deface ballots with no-holds-barred slurs against all the political parties, gained resonance throughout the country. The number of "votos nulos" cast doubled from 3% in 2006 to a shade under 6%, and in Mexico City, the "votos nulos" multiplied by 400% to 10 to 13% of the vote. This reporter observed one disgusted voter in a neighborhood polling place here in the old quarter of the capital angrily ball up his unmarked ballot and cram it through the slot in the "urna."

Because a recount must be ordered when the number of votos nulos exceeds the margin of victory between the first and second-place finishers, ballot boxes had to be opened and counted out vote by vote in as many as 27,000 out of 140,000 polling places. Indeed, the number of votos nulos - 1.8 million (a half million cast in Mexico City and Mexico state alone) - establishes the Nulos as the fifth electoral force in the country behind the PRI, PAN, PRD, and PVEM but ahead of the PT, Democratic Convergence, New Alliance, and the Social Democrats (who, failing to win 2% of the national vote, lost their registration.)

On the Mexican political calendar, the conclusion of mid-term elections signals the kick-off for the next presidential race three years down the pike in 2012. The big pro-PRI turnout puts the Dinosaurs in the driver's seat to recover Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, which it held hostage from 1928 through the new millennium.

At this fledgling stage, the PRI frontrunner is Mexico state governor Enrique Pena Nieto, a short, pretty boy politico with deep pockets, a trademark pompadour, and a glamorous soap opera star (Angelica Rivera AKA "The Seagull") on his arm - Pena Nieto, who Lopez Obrador labels "a male Barbie", is a darling of Mexico's two-headed television monopoly, Televisa and TV Azteca.

The governor's resounding sweep of Mexico state municipal (97 out of 125 city halls) and federal elections in the nation's most populous and economically active state puts him double digits above his closest rival, Manlio Fabio Beltrones, the leader of the PRI's senate delegation, and a Mafia-like political boss who is often mocked as "Don Beltrones." The "Don" is a longtime crony of the much-reviled Carlos Salinas, the former president who fell into public disgrace after his brother was imprisoned for masterminding the gangland execution of a political rival. The return of the Dinosaurs marks a possible revival of Salinas's fortunes. The bald-pated, big-eared former chief of state was pictured depositing his ballot in a large, front-page El Universal photo July 6th just to remind readers who exactly was back.

Also in the mix for the PRI nomination is the voluminous party president Beatriz Paredes, a Dinosauress whose wardrobe contains a different hand-made Indian huipil (a loose-fitting muumuu-like gown) for every day of the year.

To add to Felipe Calderon's woes, the PAN has no "bueno" or fair-haired boy in the pipeline to succeed him as president - his young protégée, Juan Camilo Mourino, the recently-appointed Interior Secretary, was killed last November in a mysterious Mexico City air crash after returning from overseeing drug war operations in the north. The PAN's affairs are managed by a council of aging elders who appear reduced to recycling bland party hacks like Senator Santiago Creel, hardly one of the premium numbers on Calderon's cell phone dial.

Who the PRD nominee will be depends largely on how long Jesus Ortega's chokehold on the party is allowed to continue. Bloodied by the July 5th debacle, the chief Chucho seems determined to compound his party's misery by expelling Lopez Obrador from the PRD on the grounds that he violated the by-laws by backing the PT in Iztapalapa. AMLO remains the most popular - if polemical - politico in Mexico with powers of convocation that far exceed any other party's front-running candidates. Having insured that the PT and Democratic Convergence retained their registration by endorsing their candidates, Lopez Obrador guaranteed himself a place on the 2012 ballot even if Ortega is successful in expelling him from the PRD.

El Peje as he is affectionately called will no doubt face-off against his successor as Mexico City mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, a strapping, well-spoken but distinctly uncharismatic politician, for the votes of Mexico's leftists in 2012.

Despite its abysmal showing July 5th, the Mexican Left by whatever initials it shows itself is hardly down for the count. The PRI's overwhelming win at the polls only represents 16% of 77,000,000 registered Mexican voters when absenteeism and votos nulos are factored into the July 5th results. The Dinosaurs staged a modest congressional comeback in 2003 mid-term elections only to be steamrolled by AMLO and Calderon in 2006. Failure to cope with continuing economic and social turmoil and the predictably polluted performance of PRI elites like the Salinas clan that seem to exult in political mayhem and armed thuggery, are bound to revive left fortunes in the next three years.

According to evolutionists, the dinosaurs went extinct 60,000,000 years ago either because a giant asteroid plunged into the Atlantic Ocean off the Yucatan peninsula lowering world temperatures by ten degrees, or because climate change so thinned out the oxygen count that the dinosaurs' huge respiratory systems no longer functioned. As climate change once again threatens Planet Earth, the comeback of the PRI dinosaurs will, no doubt, be short-lived.

Sidebar

THE GREEN PRI

The Mexican Green Ecologist Party or PVEM, which will partner with the PRI to form an absolute majority in the lower house of congress (259 out of 500 seats), is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Gonzalez Torres family. Founded by father Jose Gonzalez Torres, a wealthy construction tycoon, with ample investment from brother Victor, the king of the largest chain of generic pharmacies in Mexico, the party is presided over by Jose's young scion, Jose Emilio Gonzalez, dubbed "El Nino Verde" or "The Green Child."

Although the PVEM touts its roots in Mexico's growing environmental movement - the elder Gonzalez Torres was a player in the failed fight to shut down Laguna Verde in Veracruz, Mexico's only nuclear power plant, and active in protests against Mexico City's killer smog in the late 1980s - the Gonzalez Torres clan soon discovered that juicy government subsidies to Mexican political parties could pump up family fortunes.

First aligned with the leftist PRD and subsequently with the right-wing PAN, Gonzalez Torres had his sights set on becoming environmental secretary after the election of PANista Vicente Fox in 2000 but when he was passed over for the post, he delivered the PVEM to the PRI with which he has lined up ever since.

Having abandoned its environmental pretensions, the only green the Mexican Green Environmental party has pursued in recent years is the long green of filthy lucre. In 2004, the Nino Verde was secretly filmed soliciting a seven-figure bribe from developers keen on trashing the coastline of Caribbean Cancun. Scant days before the July 5th shakedown, a PVEM senator was nabbed at a Chiapas airport with a million pesos bundled up in his carry-on baggage.

The centerpiece of the Green Party's July 5th campaign was the restitution of the Death Penalty, which earned it the condemnation of European-based environmental parties and the PVEM has been excommunicated from the Global Greens Network. During the run-up to the recent elections, political cartoonists substituted a vulture for the party's colorful emblem, a toucan.

As the PRI's partner in crime in the new legislature, re-introducing the death penalty will be the big enchilada on the PVEM's plate. The "Greens" are also expected to lobby for rescinding electoral reforms that deprived Televisa and TV Azteca of millions in political advertising revenues in the prologue to the July 5th mid-terms - the reforms were introduced after the broadcasting giants abused the use of television and radio spots in the 2006 presidential election. To this end, Ninfa Salinas Pliego, daughter of the owner of TV Azteca, has been named to head the PVEM bench in the incoming congress.

John Ross will present IRAQIGIRL, the diary of a teenager growing up under U.S. occupation in northern Iraq, July 30th at Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia Street in San Francisco's Mission District (7 PM.) Ross developed and edited the Haymarket Books volume. These contributions will be issued at 10-day intervals while the Blindman is in California for medical tests. He can be reached at: johnross@igc.org

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