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Today's Stories August 2, 2006 John Ross August 1, 2006 Michael
Neumann Robert
Fisk Omar Barghouti Marc Levy Diana Barahona / Jeb Sprague Claud
Cockburn Ross Eisenbrey Dave Lindorff John Chuckman Francis
Boyle Phil Doe Stephen
Soldz Website of the Day
July 31, 2006 Jonathan
Cook Uri Avnery Robert
Fisk Amina Mire Marjorie
Cohn Sibel Edmonds / William
Weaver John Ross Stanley Rogouski Gideon
Levy Ron Jacobs James
Ridgeway / Alicia Ng Brian Tokar Alexander
Cockburn
July 29
/ 30, 2006 Michael
Neuman Vijay
Prashad Ramzi Kysia Werther Robert Fisk Patrick
Cockburn Ralph Nader Rachard
Itani Eduardo Galeano Gary Leupp Eve Poretsky John Chuckman Fred Gardner Juan Santos Punyapriya Dasgupta Liaquat
Ali Khan Israel Shamir William
A. Cook Stanley Heller Dave Lindorff Moshe Adler Susie
Day Pat Williams Anthony
Papa John V. Whitbeck Jackie
Corr Myles Palmer Tom D'Antoni Poets' Basement Website
of the Weekend
July 28, 2006 Jonathan
Cook Uri Avnery Renee Bowyer Robert
Fisk Patrick Cockburn Ramzy
Baroud Don Fitz Elaine
Cassel David Price Mike Whitney Mickey Z. Niranjan
Ramakrishnan Charles
Glass Website
of the Day
July 27, 2006 Tanya
Reinhart Saul Landau Ramzi
Kysia Tom Barry Joseph
Grosso Sharon Smith Gale Courey
Toensing Christopher Reed Werther Yusuf Mansur Richard
Harth Website of the Day
Norman
Solomon Barbara
Olshanksy David
Nally Jonathan
Cook Patrick
Cockburn William
Blum Joshua
Frank Gabriel
Kolko Daniel
Cassidy Michael
Dickinson Robert
Fisk Uri
Avnery Website
of the Day
July 25, 2006 Harry
Browne Marjorie
Cohn Robert
Bryce Sharat
G. Lin George
Bisharat CounterPunch
News Desk Zena
El-Khalil Larry
Lack Mike
Mejia Ashraf
Isma'il Website
of the Day
July 24, 2006 Mark
Levy Robert
Fisk Maher
Osseiran Paul
Craig Roberts Patrick
Cockburn Website
of the Day
July 22-23, 2006 Jonathan
Cook Paul
Craig Roberts Gilad
Atzmon Robert
Fisk Ralph
Nader Fred
Gardner Christopher
Reed Dr.
Susan Block Najla
Said Uri
Avnery July 21, 2006 George
Galloway P.
Sainath Aseem
Shrivastava Alexander
Cockburn Website
of the Day July 20, 2006 William
S. Lind Robert
Jensen John
Ross Tom
Hayden Paul
Craig Roberts July 19, 2006 Patrick
Cockburn Trish
Schuh Jonathan
Cook Vicente
Navarro July 17 / 18 2006 Mike
Whitney Kathleen Christison Atrocities in the Promised Land
July 14 / 15,
2006 Alexander Cockburn Tanya Reinhart Robert Fisk Daniel Cassidy Winslow Wheeler Hugh O'Shaughnessy M. Shahid Alam William S. Lind Ramzy Baroud Gilad Atzmon Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg Samar Assad Ron Jacobs Lee Ballinger Walter Brasch Dave Lindorff Clifton Ross Tom Crumpacker Ricardo Alarcon William Hughes Susie Day Farrah Hassen Poets' Basement
July 13, 2006 Rev. William
Alberts Ramzi Kysia Rep. John P. Murtha Radford / Santos Stan Cox Saul Landau José
Pertierra Website of
the Day
July 12, 2006 John Ross John Stauber Robert Boston Wayne S. Smith John Graham Kevin Prosen Jonathan Cook Website of
the Day
July 11, 2006 Dave Lindorff Dave Zirin Mokhiber / Weissman Amira Hass Clare Hanrahan Brian Cloughey Felice Pace Raed Jarrar Website of the Day
July 10, 2006 Paul Craig
Roberts Uri Avnery Roger Burbach Ron Jacobs Joshua Frank Missy Comley Beattie Alexander Cockburn
Stephen Green Paul Craig
Roberts Greg Moses Ralph Nader Laura Carlsen Conn Hallinan John Chuckman Fred Gardner Dr. Tod Mikuriya Pierre Tristam Lucinda Marshall David Swanson Heather Gray Dave Zirin
/ John Cox Mark Engler Michael Lettieri Ron Jacobs Jamal Juma' Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement
July 7, 2006 John Ross July 6, 2006 Nick Dearden John Stanton Ralph Nader Laray Polk Saul Landau Joshua Frank William S. Lind Adelman / Lindorff Jonathan Cook Website of
the Day
Mike Whitney Saul Landau Ramzy Baroud Missy Comley Beattie Arthur Neslen Vincent Maruffi Paul Cantor Paul D. Johnson David Price
Col. Dan Smith Chris Floyd Marjorie Cohn James Brooks Medea Benjamin Matt Reichel Elisa Salasin Rick Wilhelm Paul Craig
Roberts Website of the Day
July 3, 2006 Robert Bryce Dr. Bouthaina Shaban Julia Olmstead Dave Lindorff Andres Gomez Alan Singer Alexander Cockburn
Paul Craig
Roberts Stephen T.
Banko Daniel Cassidy Fawzia Afzal-Khan Jeff Taylor John Ross Greg Moses Laura Carlsen Justin E.H.
Smith Brian Cloughley Anthony Papa Mike Ferner Jerry Tucker Jane Goodall / Rick Asselta Phyllis Pollack Poets' Basement
June 30, 2006 Marjorie Cohn Heather Williams Burbach / Cantor Nick Dearden Michael J.
Smith Brian Concannon Virginia Tilley
Bill Quigley Ron Jacobs Paul Craig
Roberts June 28, 2006 Jorge Mariscal Greg Moses Mark Weisbrot Ramzy Baroud Dave Lindorff William S.
Lind Mike Ferner Zoltan Grossman
Marjorie Cohn Benjamin /
Jarrar William Hughes Doug Giebel Uri Avnery Alexander Cockburn
June 26, 2006 Don Santina Ralph Nader Dave Lindorff Rafael Rodriguez-Cruz Evelyn Pringle Jonathan Cook
June 23, 2006 Youmans / Erakat Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Col. Dan Smith
June 22, 2006 Marjorie Cohn Winslow T.
Wheeler Tanya Reinhart Mike Marqusee William Blum
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August 2, 2006 "Voto Por Votos"Mexican Civil Resistance in Five ActsBy JOHN ROSS Prologue: No Nos Moveran Tens of thousands of people the color of the earth are encamped in the zocalo and a series of 47 encampments throughout the city. They have become communities overnight, feeding themselves, holding meetings, passing out leaflets, standing in resistance to this unspeakable fraud upon the people. More are coming from the provinces every day. AMLO spoke to those gathered in the zocalo twice today. Tonight's meeting brought the water to my eyes. The rain was pouring down yet the compas stood strong under the downpour as lopez obrador updated them on whats to come. "First they ignore us, then they laugh at us, then they beat us," he said, " then we win." No estas solo", the pueblo roared back as they always do--you are not alone. Then Gabino Palomares the troubador who has appeared on so many stages at watershed moments in this never-ending struggle, sang our old anthem, We shall not be moved, No nos moveran. Thousands sang with him and our voices drown out the driving rain . History is being made here. It is the other side of the horror that Bush and his monsters have inflicted upon this worldthis slim beam of hope that people many people los de abajo can change this world--no nos moveran!
Act One: The Middle Class MEXICO CITY (August 4). Jacinto Guzman, an 80 year-old retired oilworker from Veracruz state plants himself in front of the headquarters of the Halliburton Corporation on the skyscraper-lined Paseo de Reforma here and recalls the great strikes of the 1930s that culminated in the expropriation and nationalization of Mexico's petroleum reserves. Dressed in a wrinkled suit and a hard hat, the old worker laments the creeping privatization of PEMEX, the national oil corporation, by non-Mexican subcontractors like Halliburton which is installing natural gas infrastructure in Chiapas but he is less agitated about the penetration of the transnationals in the Mexican oil industry, or even Halliburton's craven role in the Bush-Cheney Iraq war than he is about the fraud-marred July 2 presidential election here. The sign he holds reads "No A Pinche Fraude" (No to Damn Fraud!) referring to Halliburton's membership in a business confederation that financed a TV ad campaign against leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) who insists that he won the July 2 election from right-winger Felipe Calderon to whom the nation's tarnished electoral authority, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) awarded a razor-thin and much questioned "victory." Mr. Guzman's appearance at Halliburton on a Friday at the end of last month was one of myriad acts of civil resistance invoked by Lopez Obrador at a July 16 Mexico City assembly that drew more than a million participants. The campaign is designed to pressure a seven-judge panel (the "TRIFE") which must determine a winner by the first week in September, into opening up the ballot boxes and counting out the votes contained therein "voto por voto." Zeroing in on U.S. transnationals that purportedly backed Calderon, AMLO's people have invaded Wal-Mart, picketed Pepsico (its Sabritas snack brand was a big contributor to the right-winger's campaign), rented rooms in big chain hotels (Fiesta Americana) and dropped banners from the windows decrying the "pinche fraude", and blocking all eleven doors at the palatial headquarters of Banamex, once Mexico's oldest bank and now a wholly owned subsidiary of Citygroup. "Voto por Voto!" demonstrators chanted as the bankers smoked and fumed and threatened to call the police. Demonstrators also blocked the doors at the Mexican stock exchange and surrounded the studios of Televisa; the major head of the nation's two-headed television monopoly, both heads of which shamelessly tilted to Calderon before, during, and after the ballots were cast. "!Voto por Voto! Casilla por Casilla!" (Vote by Vote, Booth by Booth.) Seated on a tiny folding chair outside of Banamex, Elena Poniatowska, one of Mexico's most luminous writers and the recent winner of Spain's Cervantes Prize, reflected on the civil resistance: "We have always seen the workers demonstrate here in the Zocalo but this is all very new for our middle class. The middle class protests too, but in the privacy of their own homes. Now we are out of the closet." Ironically, the concept of peaceful civil resistance by the middle class was pioneered by Felipe Calderon's own party, the PAN, after it had been cheated out of elections in the 1980s by the then-ruling PRI. The PANistas uncharacteristically blocked highways and went on hunger strikes, and even imported Philippine trainers, veterans of Corazon Aquino's civil resistance campaign against Ferdinand Marcos to teach their supporters new tricks. Recently AMLO's party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution or PRD, stole a page from the PANista bible by holding a rally at a Mexico City statue of the right-wingers' father figure, Manuel Clouthier. During the stolen 1988 presidential election, Clouthier demanded a ballot-by-ballot recount and coined the now ubiquitous phrase "voto por voto." The PRD gathered around the statue of "Saint Maquio" left Calderon and the PAN was speechless for once. The PRD crusade could be labeled "civil resistance lite." Led by Poniatowska, opera singer Regina Orozco, and comic actress Jesusa Rodriguez, public demonstrations have been more showbiz than eruptions of mass outrage. Nonetheless, Televisa and TV Azteca, Calderon and the PAN relentlessly rag Lopez Obrador for "fomenting violence", purposefully ignoring the real daily violence that grips Mexico's cities as brutal narco gangs behead rivals and massacre their enemies in plain public view.
Act Two: Bad Gas Hundreds of steaming AMLO supporters pack the cavernous Club de Periodistas in the old quarter of the capital where computer gurus will diagnose the complexities of the cybernetic fraud Lopez Obrador is positive was perpetrated by IFE technicians this past July 2 and 5 during both the preliminary count (PREP) and the actual tally of 130,000 precincts in the nation's 300 electoral districts. The experts are as convinced as the audience that the vote was stolen on the IFE terminals but have many theories as to how. They speak of arcane algorithms and corrupted software. Juan Gurria, a computer programmer who has dropped in on his lunch hour to audit the experts, recalls the 1988 election which was stolen from leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas by the long-ruling (71 years) PRI in the nation's first cybernetic computer fraud. "In 1988, they had to shut down the computers and say the system had crashed to fix the vote but in 2006, the IFE kept the system running and we watched them steal it right before our eyes" Gurria contends, "the difference is they have better computers now." 18 years ago with computer fraud still in its infancy, the PRI had to resort to hit men to carry out its larceny. Three nights before the election, Cardenas's closest aide Francisco Xavier Ovando and his assistant Ramon Gil were executed blocks away from the Congress of the country after reportedly obtaining the password to the PRI computer system upon which the results were being cooked in favor of its candidates, the now universally reviled Carlos Salinas de Gortari. So far Computer Fraud 2006 has been less messy. Although the subject is dry and technical at one point excerpts of an analysis in the British Guardian by University of Texas economist James Galbreath was read into the record in English. AMLO's supporters mutter and grumble and nod their heads vigorously. "Asi es!" That's just the way it happened! "Voto por Voto" they rumble, "Casilla por Casilla!" after each expert scores a point. Whether or not the fix is in, they are convinced that they have been had. The PRD is trying to keep a lid on the bad gas seeping from down below. A few days after July 2, Felipe Calderon who AMLO's people have derisively dubbed "Fe-Cal", came to this same Club de Periodistas to receive the adulation of a gaggle of union bosses. When he tried to leave the club, he was assailed by street venders howling "Voto por Voto! " Calderon was quickly hustled into a bullet-proof SUV by his military escort but the angry crowd kept pounding on the tinted windows. One young man obscenely thrust his middle finger at the would-be president, The scene is replayed over and over again on Televisa and Azteca, sometimes five times in a single news broadcast, graphic footage of the kind of violence AMLO is supposed to be inciting.
Act Three: In Defense of the Voto Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador fervently believes he has won the presidency of the United States of Mexico. He says it often on television just to needle his right-wing rival Felipe Calderon. The proof, he is convinced, is inside 130,000 ballot boxes that he wants recounted, voto por voto. The ballot boxes are now stored in the Federal Electoral Institute's 300 district offices under the protection of the Mexican army. Nonetheless, in Veracruz, Tabasco, and Jalisco among other states, IFE operators have broken into the ballot boxes under the pretext of recovering lost electoral documentation. AMLO is suspicious that the officials are monkeying with the ballots, adding and subtracting the number of votos to make them conform to the IFE's incredible computer count. Hundreds of ballot boxes contain more votes than voters on the registration lists and more ballots have been judged null and void than the 243,000 margin of Calderon's as-yet unconfirmed victory. To this end, Lopez Obrador has strengthened encampments of his supporters outside the 300 electoral districts. In Monterrey, a PANista stronghold, thugs attack the encampment, beating on AMLO's people and tearing down their tent city. Rocks are thrown at his supporters in Sinaloa, drivers speed by hurling curses and spitting on them. Outside the Mexico City headquarters of the TRIFE, the seven-judge panel that will have the ultimate word as to whether or not the votos are going to be counted out one by one, a hunger strike has been ongoing since the PRD submitted documentation of anomalies in 53,000 out of the nation's 130,000 polling places. Each night a different show business personality joins the fasters, eschews dinner and camps out in the guest pup tent overnight. From Carlos Fuentes and Elena Poniatowska to painters like Jose Luis Cuevas and master designer Vicente Rojo, the arts and entertainment world has lined up behind Lopez Obrador. An exhibition by Cuevas and 50 other top line graphic artists and writers has been installed on the Alameda green strip adjacent to the Palace of Fine Arts here. After midnight, Calderon supporters slash and savage the art work, leaving a broken jumble behind. The next day brigades of AMLO's people from the surrounding neighborhoods rescue what they can of the exhibit, reassemble the broken shards, sew the torn art back together, and prop up the display panels. This is what democracy looks like in Mexico on July 20, 2006.
The integrity of the Federal Electoral Commission is in the eye of Hurricane AMLO. Lopez Obrador accuses the IFE of fixing the election for Felipe Calderon and then defending his false victory. The PRD has filed criminal charges against the nine members of the IFE's ruling council, most prominently its chairman, the gray-faced bureaucrat Luis Carlos Ugalde, for grievous acts of bias against Lopez Obrador, including refusing to halt Calderon's hate spots in the run-up to July 2. The IFE is mortally offended by the allegations that it has committed fraud and is using its enormously extravagant budget (larger than all of the government's anti-poverty programs combined) to run spots protesting the slurs on its integrity that are every bit as virulent and ubiquitous as Calderon's toxic hit pieces. Actors have been hired to impersonate irate citizens who allegedly were chosen at random as polling place workers July 2. "The votes have already been counted" they scoff. "We did not commit fraud" they insist. The idea is preposterous, an insult to their patriotism and to one of the pillars of Mexican "democracy", the IFE. Luis Carlos Ugalde, the president of the IFE council, has not been seen in public for several weeks except in large Wanted posters pasted to the walls of the inner city SE BUSCA POR FRAUDE ELECTORAL! Ugalde and two other IFE counselors are protégés of powerful teachers union czar Elba Esther Gordillo who joined forces with the PAN to take revenge on failed PRI presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo, a mortal enemy. The nine-member council is composed entirely of PRI and PAN nominees the PRD is, of course, excluded. Despite rumors that he had fled the country, Ugalde shows up July 27 at the first IFE meeting since the district tallies three weeks previous where he is confronted by the PRD delegate to the Institute (each party has one delegate.) During an acrimonious seven-hour meeting, Horacio Duarte keeps waving 30 partially burnt ballots, most of them marked for AMLO, that he has just been handed by an anonymous source. Duarte wants to know where Ugalde lives so he can nail one of the ballots to his front door to expose the "shame" of the fraud-marred election. The gray-faced bureaucrat grows even grayer and threatens to suspend the session. OK, OK, Duarte concedes, I'll just hang it on your office door. Just then a score of protestors
push their way past the IFE guards at the auditorium's portals
the meeting is a public one. They are chanting "Voto
por Voto" and carrying bouquets of yellow flowers, AMLO's
colors. A PRD deputy tries to hand one to Luis Carlos Ugalde
who turns away in horror. A bodyguard snatches up the blossoms
as if they were a terrorist bomb, and disposes of them post-haste. Act Five: We Shall Not Be Moved The clock is ticking. The TRIFE must declare a new president latest September 5. The seven judges, all in the final year of their ten year terms (three will move up to the Supreme Court in the next administration) have just begun to dig their way into the slagheap of legal challenges that impugn the results in about half of the 130,000 polling places in the land, the ham-handed bias of the IFE prior to the election, and the strange behavior of the Federal Electoral Institute's computers on election day and thereafter. The TRIFE, which has sometimes struck down corrupted state and local elections and ordered recounts in a handful of electoral districts, can either determine that the legal challenges would not affect enough votes to overturn the IFE's determination that Calderon won the election, annul the entire election if it adjudges that it was illegitimately conducted, or order a recount. If the judges determine that annulment is the only way to fix the inequities, a new election would be scheduled 18 months down the pike. In the meantime, the Mexican Congress would name an interim president, an unprecedented resolution in modern political history here just the fact it is being discussed is, in itself, unprecedented. Among those mentioned for the post are National Autonomous University rector Juan Ramon de la Fuente, former IFE director Jose Woldenberg, and three-time presidential loser Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, son of beloved depression-era president Lazaro Cardenas. For Cuauhtemoc, who was defrauded out of the presidency in 1988 by the same kind of flimflam with which the PAN and the IFE seek to despoil Lopez Obrador of victory in 2006, an interim presidency would be a perfect solution. Fixated on fulfilling the destiny of following in his father's footsteps, moving back into his boyhood home. Los Pinos--the Mexican White House would be sweet revenge against his former protégé and now bitter rival on the left, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. But AMLO does not want the election annulled and an interim appointed. He is obsessed with proving his triumph at the polls and is not going to sit on his hands waiting for the TRIFE to reach its learned conclusions. A gifted leader of street protest, he has summoned his people to the capitol's Tiennemens-sized Zocalo square three times since July 2, each time doubling the numbers of the masses who march through the city: 500,000 on July 8, 1.1 million on July 16, and 2.4 million this past Sunday, July 30 (police estimates)--Sunday's gathering was the largest political demonstration in the nation's history. The "informative assemblies" as AMLO tags them, have been festive occasions but underneath there is palpable anger, the bad gas rising from down below. Lopez Obrador's people come in family, arm babies and grandpas, often in wheelchairs are on canes. Some come costumed as clowns and pirates. dangling grotesque marionettes, lopsided home-made heads of FeCal, or pushing a replica of the Trojan Horse ("El Cabellito Trojanito".) They look like they are having fun but their frustrations can well up to the surface in a flash, say when the hated Televisa and TV Azteca appear on the scene. "QUE SE MUERE TELEVISA!" (THAT TELEVISA SHOULD DIE!) the people the color of the earth snarl and scream, pounding fiercely on the television conglomerate's vehicles. At the July 30 "informative assembly", Lopez Obrador ups the ante considerably in his high stakes poker game to pry open the ballot boxes. Now instead of calling for yet another monster gathering in the Zocalo (4.8 million?), he asks all those who had come from the provinces and the lost cities that line this megalopolis to stay where they are in permanent assembly until the TRIFE renders a decision. 47 encampments will be convened extending from the great plaza, through the old quarter, all the way to the ring road that circles the capital, snarling Mexico City's already impenetrable traffic, raising the level of greenhouse gases and urban tempers to the point of combustion. When Lopez Obrador calls for a vote on his proposal, 2,000,000 or so "SI's" soared from the throats of the gargantuan throng, followed by the now obligatory roars of "No Estas Solo" ("you are not alone") and "Voto by Voto, Casilla by Casilla." As if on cue, AMLO's people began assembling the encampments state by state and Mexico City neighborhood by neighborhood. For a correspondent who once wrote a novel fictionalizing the stealing of the 1988 election ("Tonatiuh's People", Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso, 1999), in which the people the color of the earth march on Mexico City and vote to stay in permanent assembly in the Zocalo, fantasy has turned into the actualities of daily reporting. I am not surprised by this startling turn of events. When I first arrived here in the old quarter days after the 8.2 earthquake that devastated this capital, the "damnificados" (refugees) were encamped in the streets, demanding relief and replacement housing and liberation from the ruling PRI and their movement from the bottom reinvigorated a civil society that today infuses AMLO's struggle for electoral democracy. This morning, the damnificados of the PAN and the IFE, Calderon and the fat cats, are again living on these same streets. On the first evening of the taking of Mexico City, AMLO spoke to thousands crowded into the Zocalo in a driving downpour and invoked Gandhi: "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they beat you, and then you win." And then Gabino Palomares, a troublemaking troubadour who has been up there on the stage at every watershed event in recent Mexican history from the slaughter of striking students at Tlatelolco (1968) to the Zapatistas' March of the Those the Color of the Earth (2001) took the mic to lead the mob in that old labor anthem, "We Shall Not Be Moved" and AMLO's people thundered back in a roar that drowned out the weeping sky, "NO NOS MOVERAN!" John Ross's "ZAPATISTAS! Making Another World
Possible â_" Chronicles of Resistance 2000-2006"
will be published by Nation Books in October. Ross is now tracking
down venues for presentations. All suggestions will be cheerfully
accepted at: johnross@igc.org
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from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann  Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair          Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid? CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues, as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.                    |
