Today's Stories

October 2-4, 2009

Saul Landau
News From Raul Castro

October 1, 2009

Andy Worthington
A Truly Shocking Gitmo Story

Carl Ginsburg
The Great Marginalization

Mary Lynn Cramer
Seniors on the Chopping Block

Col. Douglas Macgregor
The Bog of History in Afghanistan

Brian M. Downing
The Paradox of Financial Disorder

John V. Walsh
Mao's China at 60

Ramzy Baroud
The Big Diversion

Norman Solomon
Starting Another Year of War in Afghanistan

Dan Bacher
Undamming the Klamath

Brenda Norrell
Lazy Journalists are the Darlings of the Corporations

Website of the Day
Neoliberalism as Water Balloon

September 30, 2009

Vijay Prashad
McChrystal's Afghan Desolation

Gareth Porter
U.S. Story on Iran Nuke Facility Doesn't Add Up

Andy Thayer
The Fiasco Behind Chicago's Olympics Bid

Paul Craig Roberts
Another War in the Works

Dean Baker
Medicare Buy-In: What's Wrong With Giving People a Choice?

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Mission Impossible

Laura Flanders
Punch in the Streets, But Not in the Suites

Dave Lindorff
The Baucus Excuse

Seumas Milne
Why British Workers Are Angry

Martha Rosenberg
What Integrity Means to Pfizer

Website of the Day
Why You Should Boycott Hyatt Hotels

September 29, 2009

Marshall Auerback
A Neoliberal Hijacking

Alan Farago
Recovery Without Feeling

Jeff Sher
Shopping for Health Care

Bruce Jackson
60 Minutes and the General

Gareth Porter
Fears of Defeat in Afghanistan

Jonathan Cook
Palestinians in the Israeli Army

Bouthaina Shaaban
Arabs in the International Balance

Dave Lindorff
Looking Under the TARP

Stephen Soldz
Spreading Hysteria About Swine Flu "Hysteria"

Sara Mann
The Party of No Meets the Island of No

Website of the Day
Cosmos, Autotuned

September 28, 2009

Laura Carlsen
The Sound and Fury of the Honduran Coup

Anthony DiMaggio
The U.S., Iran and Nuclear Terror

Paul Craig Roberts
More Lies, More Deceptions

Neve Gordon
On Palestinian Civil Disobedience

Bill Quigley
Street Report From the G20

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's LBJ Moment

Nicola Nasser
Stuck Between Two Failures

Ben Rosenfeld Murder in New Orleans: Remembering Kirsten Brydum

Website of the Day
The Short March

September 25-7, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Ruin of His Presidency

Daniel Wolff
Speculating on Education

Rev. William E. Alberts
How "White Magic" Makes the Ism of Race Disappear

Mike Roselle
Send Lawyers, Guns and Money

Saul Landau
Covert Memories From Miami

Eshan Azari
Why Afghan Intellectuals Live in National Despair

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Pentagon Feedlot

Robert Jensen
Is Obama a Socialist?

Jonathan Cook
Sleeping with the Enemy

Nelson P Valdés
Cuba, Hurricanes and the Internet

David Michael Green
Dumping Dubya

Ramzy Baroud
The Goldstone Report and Israeli Impunity

John V. Whitbeck
The Partition Straightjacket

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trial Delayed ... Again

David Ker Thomson
The Lady Vanishes

Seth Sandronsky
Obama and Race Management

Jim Goodman
Why are Farmers Afraid of Michael Pollen?

Charles R. Larson
From Oppression to Opportunity

David Yearsley
Froberger's Travels

Kim Nicolini
Hardcore Capitalism

Lorenzo Wolff
Transparent Pink

Website of the Weekend
An Emergency Appeal in the Fight Against Big Coal

September 24, 2009

Steven Higgs
Even in Indiana, Doctors Support National Health Insurance

Christopher Brauchli
Death Pays

Marshall Auerback
The Shortfall at the FDIC

Stephanie Westbrook
Italy's Fallen Soldiers

Nadia Hijab
Know Your Dictator

Sen. Russell Feingold
Fixing the Patriot Act, Restoring the Constitution

David Macaray
Goodbye "Norma Rae"

Binoy Kampmark
Curry Bashings in Oz

Joe Allen
Dancing With the Hammer

Website of the Day
The Most Corrupt Members of Congress

September 23, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
The Economy is a Lie, Too

Gabriel Kolko
The United States in Afghanistan: Eight Years Later

Uri Avnery
The Waldorf-Astoria Summit

Shamus Cooke
The First Shots of the Trade War

Missy Beattie
The Sound of Money

Gareth Porter
Taliban Rising

Mark Weisbrot
How Much Repression Will Hillary Clinton Support in Honduras?

Dr. Susan Block
The Murder of Annie Le

Norm Kent
Pot and the Right to Pursue Happiness

Richard Neville
Apocalypse Porno

Website of the Day
In Carver Country

September 22, 2009

Franklin C. Spinney The Huge Hole in Gen. McChrystal's Afghan Counterinsurgency Strategy

Russell Mokhiber
Who's the Pimp?

Greg Grandin
Zelaya's Brazilian Gambit

Nikolas Kozloff
Salvaging Democracy in Honduras Will Be Tricky

John Ross
Mexico Convulsed by Paranoia

Ron Jacobs
Gen. McChrystal's Salespitch

Tariq Ali
The Afghan Folly

Dave Lindorff
NYT Trashes Single-Payer

Harvey Wasserman
Tom Friedman's Idiocy Atomique

Vijay Prashad
Is Anything Better Than Nothing?

Kareem Shora
After the CIA Torture Report

Website of the Day
Did a State Dept Official Sell Nuclear Secrets?

September 21, 2009

JoAnn Wypijewski
Will Trumka or the Steelworkers Push Labor Into Battle?

Carl Finamore
Backstage at the AFL-CIO Convention

Uri Avnery
Sliming Goldstone and His Report

Nikolas Kozloff
Joe Wilson's Immigration Hypocrisy

Paul Simpson, M.D.
Why Your Doctor May Have PTSD

Alan Nasser
New Deal Liberalism Writes Its Obituary

Ray McGovern
CIA Torturers Running Scared

Dave Lindorff
Thoughts on Saving an Old Barn

Lina Thorne
Women, War and Afghanistan

Jeb Sprague
Confronting the G20

Website of the Day
Petition: Save the Yellowstone Grizzly

September 18-20, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
When Gossip Came Back and Our Modern Age was Born

Russell Mokhiber
Meet the Real Death Panels

Mike Whitney
The Post-Bubble Malaise

David Michael Green
Can America be Salvaged?

Jonathan Cook
Boycott Derails Jerusalem Rail Line

Nadia Hijab
Sinking the Goldstone Report

Mark Weisbrot
Recession, Recovery and Reform: Will Anything Change?

Michael Winship
Let's Make a Deal, Beltway Edition

Michael Leonardi
The Nuclear Dump in the Mediterranean Sea

Andy Worthington
The Kuwaiti Who Met Bin Laden

Fred Gardner
The Prohibitionists' Manifesto

David Macaray
What Happens in Congress Stays in Congress

David Rosen
System Failure and the Garrido Case

Jason Mark
Hacking the Sky

Mike Ferner
In Praise of Senator Baucus

Farzana Versey
The Great Indian Rope Trick

Ron Jacobs
Dr. Guillotin and Dr. Faustus: an Interview with Marc Estrin

elin o'Hara slavick
Flags for Hiroshima: Artist's Statement

Gilad Aztmon
Vengeance, Barbarism and Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds

David Yearsley
Mendelssohn as Organ Maestro

Charles R. Larson
Darkness, Dignity and Hope in Liberia

Lorenzo Wolff
Dialing Up The Clash

Website of the Weekend
Meet Your Conservative Movement

September 17, 2009

Joshua Frank
Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler

Brenda Norrell
Cry Me a River: Uranium and Genocide in Indian Country

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis, One Year Later

Pam Martens
The Filmmakers vs. the Capitalists

Franklin Lamb
Palestinian Camps Are Ready to Erupt

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: An Insult to Humanity

Jed Bickman
Drone War Over Pakistan

Alan Farago
The Mayor of Coconut Creek Gets Butterflies

Website of the Day
C.R.O.C.

September 16, 2009

Ray McGovern
Torture and Accountability

Stephen Green
America's Strange Health Care Debate

Andy Worthington
Is Bagram Obama's New Secret Prison?

Dean Baker
Short Sellers: the Unsung Heroes of the Financial Crisis

Anthony DiMaggio
Killing the Messenger

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: The Unheard Call

Benjamin Dangl
Justice Follows Direct Action

Robin Willoughby
The World Seed Conference: Good for Farmers?

Eric Walberg
EuroPeace, the Sounds of Silence

James Ridgeway
Bring That "Boy" Down

Website of the Day
Baucus' Bogus Bill

September 15, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Real Lesson of Lehman's Fall

Mutadhar al-Zaidi
The Story of My Shoe

Marshall Auerback
Government Spending is the Solution--Not the Problem

Afshin Rattansi
The Deal That Led to the Srebrenica Massacre: Former UN Spokeswoman Fingers Holbrooke and the Clinton Administration

Jonathan Cook
How US Tax Breaks Fund Israeli Settlers

Gareth Porter:
Niger Redux? IAEA Conceals Evidence Iran Nuke Docs Were Forged

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs More Catcalls

Winslow T. Wheeler
Obama and Pentagon Pork

Franklin Spinney
Bin Laden's Latest Message and the Nuttiness of the War on Terror

Karen Korenoski /
Michael Yates
Up in Wood Smoke: Boulder's Dirty Little Secret

David Macaray
Government Cheese

Susie Day
President Mao-bama's Little Red Primer

Website of the Day
The Cotton Pickin' Truth: the Persistance of Slavery in Mississippi

September 14, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
The Health Care Deceit

M. G. Piety
The Danes Do It (Health Care) Better

Shamus Cooke
Wall Street Under Obama: Bigger and Riskier

Bouthaina Shaaban
Three Faces and a Homeland

Alvaro Huerta
In Defense of the Undocumented: Immigrants and Health Care

John Ross
Mexico Loses Its History

Harvey Wasserman
The Supreme Court and Corporate Money

Adam Federman
The Plight of the Bumblebee

Stephen Fleischman
The Federal Twist

Robert Jensen
Can Journalism Schools be Relevant in a World on the Brink?

Website of the Day
The Origin of Sex Offender Registries

September 11-13, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Big Speech: Math Trumps Rhetoric

JoAnn Wypijewski
Trumka Takes Over AFL-CIO

Carl Ginsburg
The Patient as Profit Center

Leonard Peltier
I am Barack Obama's Political Prisoner Now

Franklin Lamb
Ted Kennedy's Changing Take on Israel

Benjamin Dangl
Throwing Bullets at Failed Policies

Mike Whitney
How to Fight Deflation

John Berger
In Search of Antonello

Saul Landau
Watergate and Modern Scandals

Russell Mokhiber
Disgraceful Democrats

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Pryor's Judgment

Felice Pace
NPR's Linda Gradstein Has Done It Again on Gaza

Jordan Flaherty
The Battle Over Discriminatory Housing Laws in New Orleans

Ron Jacobs
It's Time to be Impolite About Afghanistan

David Macaray
The Utility of Boycotts

David Correia
Welcome to the Business-Friendly Carpenter's Union

Robert Bryce
Wind Turbines and Bird Kills

Christopher Brauchli
Defenders of the Classroom

Paul Krassner
Aha! A Few Words About the 9/11 Truth Movement

Charles R. Larson
Deracination

Kim Nicolini
"Extract:" An Exercise in Economic Realism

David Yearsley
Tall Buildings: the Sound and the Silence

Lorenzo Wolff
In Defense of the One Hit Wonder

Poets' Basement
McEnteer and Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Pizarchik: the Wrong Choice

September 10, 2009

Joshua Frank
Inside Hanford's B Reactor: a Tour of the World's Most Toxic Nuclear Site

Dean Baker
Bernanke's Bad Money

Brian M. Downing
The State of U.S. National Security

Franklin C. Spinney
Portrait of an Afghan Firefight: Up Close and Personal

Andy Worthington
No Escape From Guantánamo

Chase Madar
Samantha Power and the Weaponization of Human Rights

Farzana Versey
A Tale of Two Slums

Ronnie Cummins
Whole Foods, Fair Trade and Organics

Binoy Kampmark
Health Care, Obama and the System

Timothy Lebrón
The Conservative Case for Health Care Reform

Charles R. Larson
A Solution to the Health Care Dilemma

Website of the Day
The Debtor's Revolt Begins!

September 9, 2009

Richard Neville
Trigger-Happy in Afghanistan

Melissa Checker
Double Jeopardy: Carbon Offsets and Human Rights Abuses

Nadia Hijab
Settling for ... Settlements?

Robert Weissman
The Stakes at the Supreme Court

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Arabs Call for General Strike

Russell Mokhiber
Pollan, Mackey, Whole Foods and Single Payer

James Ridgeway
The Dotty Factor: Will Demented Geezers Wreck the Economy?

Richard W. Behan
Obama's Imperative in Afghanistan

James McEnteer
The Photo and the Secretary: How to Appall Robert Gates

Martha Rosenberg
Hatchery Horrors

Website of the Day
Belmondo Verité

September 8, 2009

Henry A. Giroux
The Corporate Stranglehold on Education

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Accused of War Crimes Opposes Investigations

John Ross
Rituals of the Absurd

Jeff Leys
Health Care vs. Warfare: the Future of the Afghan War

Mike Whitney Ashcroft: Repugnant to the Constitution

Shamus Cooke
Obama's Empty Labor Day Speech

Ellen Brown
Did Lehman Brothers Fall or Was It Pushed?

Norman Solomon Men With Guns: In Kabul and Washington

Deepak Tripathi
The Axis of Evil and the Great Satan

Laray Polk
Personality Cults, Indoctrination and Inculcation

Charles R. Larson
Just Who Does He Think He Is?

Website of the Day
The President is Not a Guidance Counselor

September 7, 2009

Vicente Navarro
Obama's Mistakes in Health Care Reform

Bouthaina Shaaban
In Praise of Admiral Mullen

David Macaray
Obama's Labor Day Report Card

Paul Craig Roberts
Indefensible Nation

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Ads Warn Against Marrying Non-Jews

Conn Hallinan
Brazil Flexes Its Muscles

Walter Brasch
The Origins of Labor Day, the Unknown Holiday

Mark Weisbrot
IMF Gives Honduran Government $175 Million

Carl Finamore
China's Birthday Stimulation

C. G. Estabrook
Advance Text of Obama's Big Speech

Website of the Day
One Down, 20,000 to Go

September 4-6, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Deeper Into the Tunnel

Carl Ginsburg
Saving New Orleans' Charity Hospital

Jonathan Cook
The Missing Link in Israeli Organ Theft?

George Wuerthner
The Unintended Consequences of Wolf Hunting

Marc Levy
The Bling They Curse and Carry

Ray McGovern
Holbrooke's Afghan Benchmark

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
It Happened in Miami

Joe Paff
Organizing the Mission

Gareth Porter
Taliban's Tank-Killing Bombs Came From CIA, Not Iran

Devin Beaulieu
Scaremongering About Bolivia and Islam

Anthony Papa
Why Leslie Crocker Snyder Should Not Become New York City's New DA

David Ker Thomson
Love and Dekes in Utopia

Don Fitz
The Case of the Biodevastation 7: What the Police Won't Apologize For

Lee Sustar /
S. Sepehri
The Fallout From Iran's Elections

Jim Goodman
Why Honor Organized Labor?

Wajahat Ali
Domestic Crusaders: Making Muslim American Theater

Ron Jacobs
Agitator Journalism: Remembering Ramparts

Helen Redmond
The Lion Sleeps Tonight: the Crimes and Misdemeanors of Teddy Kennedy

John V. Walsh
Obama to Cindy Sheehan: Get Lost

Charles R. Larson
Mandanipour's Masterpiece: Censoring an Iranian Love Story

Mark Scaramella
Ho-Bleeping-Hum: a Few Well-Chosen Words About Valerie Plame's Book

David Yearsley
Cameron Carpenter's Amazing Organ Transplants

Ben Sonnenberg
Hooking, Breaking Friendships, Cross-Dressing and, Above All, Delphine Seyrig

Poets' Basement
Davies, Orloski and Bready

Website of the Weekend
Architectural Semiotics with Glenn Beck

September 3, 2009

Marcus Rediker
Inside Auburn Prison

Ron Jacobs
Embedded With the Taliban

Mike Whitney
How Bad Will It Get?

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Untold Story of the Cuban Five: Indictment À La Carte

Saul Landau
Moby Dick and Asian Typhoons

Anat Matar
Israeli Academics Must Pay a Price to End Occupation

Tanya Golash-Boza
How Immigration Enforcement is Weakening National Security

Dave Lindorff
Which Side Are You On?

Andy Worthington
The Story of Gitmo's Two Syrians

Website of the Day
Plundering Appalachia

September 2, 2009

John Ross
Mexico's Plagues

Vijay Prashad
Hey Ram, the Things the Financial Times Group Does!

Rev. Jim Rigby
Why is Universal Health Care "Un-American"?

Joanne Mariner
What the Inspector General Found

Missy Beattie
Hejira: At Martha's Vineyard with Cindy Sheehan

Soren Ambrose
Multilateral Money

Diane Farsetta
Water: the Newest Wave of Corporate "Social Responsibility"

Nadia Hijab
Mulling Mullen's Message

Shamus Cooke
How to Lower the Deficit Without Killing Social Security

Charles R. Larson
Is Dick Cheney Running Scared?

Website of the Day
Inside the Egg Hatchery

September 1, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Wolf at Trout Creek

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Not Sanctions for Israel?

Mark T. Harris
The Whole Foods Boycott: It's About More Than CEO Hypocrisy

Dean Baker
Bank Profits Are Up: Did You Hear Anyone Say, "Thank You"?

Jeffrey Buchanan
Ending the Human Rights Crisis in KatrinaRitaVille

Robin Mittenthal
A Sea of Monocrops: Old MacDonald Never Had a Farm Like This

Ellen Brown
Mercury Mischief

Martha Rosenberg
Vytorin Marketing is Back

Website of the Day
Crazy Town Hall Protester Interviews

Weekend Edition
October 2-4, 2009

La Jornada at 25

Chomsky in Mexico

By JOHN ROSS

Seven mornings a week, Vicente Ramirez's battered aluminum kiosk on Cinco de Mayo Street in this city's old quarter is plastered with the front pages of 22 daily newspapers. All day handfuls of pedestrians pause to gawk at the incendiary headlines slapped to the siding, often engaging in animated debate about the nature of the news. "This country is going down the toilet," sneers one elderly gentleman studying a story about a particularly cruel kidnapping. "Ay Mamacita!" another old gaffer exclaims, oogling a bare-breasted senorita.

Fully a quarter of the score of dailies on view at Vicente's kiosk are dedicated to the "nota roja" or "red note." Tabloids like La Prensa (reputedly Mexico's biggest seller but circulation figures are elusive) and Impacto are all blood and tits, spotlighting brutal beheadings, sensational crimes of passion, and bevies of topless lasses. Three sports dailies including the venerable Esto, which still publishes in sepia, rivet the ad hoc attentions of passerbys. Two financial papers (El Financiero and El Economista), The News (a re-incarnation of the long-lived English-language paper) and El Pais, or at least the Mexican edition of the prestigious Madrid daily, dangle from Vicente's stand. Noontime and evening editions of Mexico City papers will join the display during the day.

Editorial slants run from hard right to soft left - Cronica, reputedly financed by the reviled ex-president Carlos Salinas, savagely slams the left-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) that has managed the affairs of the capital for the past 12 years. Many of the dailies hung from Vicente's kiosk exist only to cadge juicy government advertising and are hesitant to bite the hand that feeds them. Excelsior and El Universal, broadsheets founded in the midst of the Mexican Revolution not quite a hundred years ago, make much of their "impartiality" but are intractably linked to the once and future ruling PRI party. Reforma and its tabloid sidekick Metro are sounding boards for the right-wing PAN of which President Felipe Calderon is king - both are unavailable at Vicente's kiosk, having broken with the powerful Newspaper Venders Union, and they now field an army of comically uniformed street hawkers.

The only openly left wing daily in this vast array, La Jornada ("The Work Day"), is Vicente's best seller at 20 a day, followed by La Prensa (15) and Universal (10.) When leftists gather in the nearby Zocalo plaza, usually for events captained by ex-Mexico City mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), Vicente will sell up to a hundred Jornadas.

One caveat: despite this monumental exhibition of newsprint and dead trees, the first news source for 95% of all Mexicans is still the nation's two-headed TV monopoly, Televisa and TV Azteca.

September has been a big month for La Jornada. To celebrate its 25th birthday, the National Lottery offered a commemorative ticket as did the Mexico City Metro subway system, rare mainstream honors for a lefty rag, and notorious U.S. rabble rouser Noam Chomsky came to town to help cut the cake - along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez (a founding investor) and the much-lauded Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, Chomsky is one of several literary superstars whose words fill the pages of La Jornada.

The Jornada was founded in 1984 by itinerant journalists who had bounced from one short-lived left periodical to the next - for many of the original Jornaleros, like LJ's first editor Miguel Angel Granados Chapa, the last ports of call had been Uno Mas Uno ("One Plus One") and El Dia but when their publishers were bought off by then-president Miguel De la Madrid, the lefty newshounds trundled their old Underwoods (computers were nowhere on the horizon back then) up the winding stairs of La Jornada's old ramshackle headquarters on Balderas Street's newspaper row and went to work.

Nostalgia was on the menu for La Jornada's 25th. During one celebration under chandeliers at the elegant Casa Lamm where the paper presents weekly forums on burning social issues, founding director Carlos Payan recalled how in February 1984 he summoned movers and shakers from a broad spectrum of the Mexican Left to the phantasmagoric Hotel Mexico, the unfinished dream of Spanish visionary Manuel Suarez with a revolving rooftop restaurant (it has since been converted into Mexico's World Trade Center.) 800 potential investors showed up at the assembly, buying in at a thousand pesos a share - one of those on hand was Carlos Slim, now the third richest tycoon on the planet but then still a two-bit corporate cannibal who shared Payan's Lebanese ancestry. Two of Mexico's most illustrious painters, Rufino Tamayo and Francisco Toledo, donated priceless works that became La Jornada's principal capital.

Payan's words to those gathered in the Insurgentes Avenue ballroom that night ring just as true today as they did back then: "In this hour of crisis, we convoke a new labor of critical journalism in solidarity with those who struggle for the causes of this country."

The first issue of La Jornada rolled off borrowed presses September 19th of that year to the universal disdain of Mexico's ruling class which then maintained a hammerlock on the press, doling out government advertising and even newsprint to newspapers based on their allegiances to the PRI and the government it commanded. The barons of the press gave the left daily a few short months of life at best.

La Jornada was indeed born into turbulent times - always a propitious moment for independent journalism. Mexico had just gone belly up, forced into default of $100,000,00,000 USD in short-term foreign bank loans by plunging oil prices, and the crisis kicked the legs out from under outgoing president Jose Lopez Portillo and his hand-picked successor De la Madrid. Wars fomented by U.S. proxies were raging in neighboring Central America - two of the paper's veteran reporters Carmen Lira (now Payan's replacement as director) and Blanche Petrich (winner of the National Journalism Award) made their bones in El Salvador and Nicaragua.

On the first anniversary of La Jornada's birth, Mexico City was savaged by an 8.1 grade earthquake that took up to 30,000 lives and when the "damnificados" (survivors) built a social movement that triggered the resurgence of Mexican civil society, La Jornada became its voice.

The left daily's history is built on such dramatic moments. During and after the stealing of the 1988 presidential election from leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas by the evil Salinas and the PRI, La Jornada stood on the front lines, exposing the fraud that included everything from tens of thousands of burnt ballots to crashing computers, and the paper accompanied Cardenas when he consolidated the PRD in 1989 - the Jornada is often accused of being the left-center party's mouthpiece.

In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, also in 1989, La Jornada played a critical role in the debate about the future of the Mexican Left and the left press.

The Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas that exploded on January 1st 1994 further burnished La Jornada's bonafides and sold tons of papers for Vicente Ramirez. Petrich rode into the jungle on horseback and got the first interview with Subcomandante Marcos and Hermann Bellinghausen, another National Journalism Award winner (he turned it down) has reported daily from that conflictive zone ever since.

As the '90s ebbed into the new millennium, La Jornada closely covered the collapse of the PRI and the installation of the rightist PAN in Los Pinos, the Mexican White House. The paper's platoon of mordant, militant political cartoonists continue to relentlessly lampoon and skewer the political class.

For the 12 years that the PRD has administered the affairs of this monstrous megalopolis, La Jornada has provided critical support and has, in fact, played a key role in the democratization of the most contaminated, crime-ridden, corrupt and chaotic city in the western hemisphere.

The left daily's reportage of the heist of the 2006 "presidenciales" by Felipe Calderon from Lopez Obrador - who still enjoys the blessings of the Jornaleros - became Vicente Ramirez's bread and butter. "I sold a "chingo" ('a fucking lot'.) They flew out of here like "balas" ('bullets'.")

Giving this bold trajectory and because LJ has never been "a yes man for the corrupt governments of the PAN and the PRI" (Lira), the paper is despised by right-wingers and establishment intellectuals. Historian Enrique Krauze's vitriol at La Jornada is splattered all over the glossy pages of his Letras Libres. Writing in Krauze's rightist monthly, poet-philosopher Gabriel Zaid bemoans the influence that LJ has accumulated over the years: "how can La Jornada have so much weight when important decisions are taken in this country?" he complains, blaming the paper's "opportunistic" use of culture. "La Jornada brings together left intellectuals who define what they think is political correct."

Every morning, LJ's letters to the editor column is packed with bristling epistles from government flunkies assailing La Jornada reporters for exposing the shenanigans of the bureaucracy. When the left paper reports on the dirty dealings of provincial governors and their abuses of authority, the governors are apt to send agents into the street to confiscate every Jornada in the state. State and federal governments threaten the withdrawal of paid publicity but LJ's clout has often nullified the denial of this lifeblood of the Mexican newspaper industry. For its 25th anniversary edition, mortal foes of La Jornada like Oaxaca's tyrannical governor Ulises Ruiz, the Falangist state government of Guanajuato, and the Zapatista-hating mayor of San Cristobal de las Casas were all obligated to take out paid birthday greetings.

While the corporate newspaper industry appears to be gasping its last in the United States where no comparable left daily has ever survived for longer than two years (PM in New York City in the late '40s), Jornada runs in the black.

Although La Jornada is published in Mexico City, the hub of a highly centralized nation from which all power emanates, the Jornaleros have mothered affiliated dailies in eight Mexican states and the national edition is distributed from Tijuana to Tapachula on the southern border where eager readers snatch up the paper the moment it hits the stands. In addition to the print edition, La Jornada On Line receives thousands of hits each day and has attracted a lively community of bloggers.

Despite its long reach into the provinces, La Jornada is anything but provincial. Its correspondents prowl New York and Moscow and Havana, Bolivia and Chile and Argentina. The newspaper's perspective is firmly grounded in the global south but Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn share their London Independent dispatches from Middle East hotspots. This correspondent reported on the first days of Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq from Baghdad. Similarly, David Brooks covered the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington from Ground Zero. Luis Hernandez Navarro never misses an international anti-globalization mobilization or World Social Forum. Cronista (chronicler) Arturo Cano hangs out with Mel Zelaya in Tegucigalpa.

La Jornada does not only print the news, it makes it, actively espousing social causes and decrying injustice daily on its pages. In fact, the resistance of marginated communities from Chiapas to Pais Vasco would be little noted if the news had not first run in La Jornada. Crucial to this insemination of resistance in Mexico are daily notices of meetings and forums and rallies and marches that act as a mighty force multiplier for left movements, turning handfuls into multitudes. La Jornada, whose strong suit is reporting on social movements, has itself become a social movement.

Although politics are its main course, La Jornada publishes monthly supplements on agriculture, the environment, labor, indigenous cultures, women's struggles, and gay and lesbian rights. The weekly cultural insert and daily reports on painting, dance, literature, music, and popular entertainment have deep scratch among cultural workers. The Jornada even once published a weekly magazine in English, a losing commercial venture that was eventually killed by Lira. "We are not going to spend the benefits of our workers" by continuing to publish a magazine "in the language of the oppressors," Carmen explained to this writer at the time. Jornada workers have built a strong in-house union.

La Jornada also operates a book publishing arm with dozens of titles authored by its own reporters like Bellinghausen's account of the massacre at Acteal, "A Crime of State." Translations of Noam Chomsky's multiple works are hot sellers.

Despite hard-wired anti-gringo sentiments, La Jornada invited the renowned gavacho gadfly to crown its 25th birthday celebration with a magnum lecture at the National University. Noam Chomsky is hardly the only U.S. lefty to adorn LJ's op ed columns - Howard Zinn, Immanuel Wallerstein, James Petras, and Amy Goodman are regular collaborators. In introducing his September 21st lecture at the UNAM, the oldest and most prestigious in the Americas, Carmen Lira posited that Chomsky's analysis of mass media in writings like "Manufacturing Consent" and the ethical guidance of the late Polish journalist Ryzsward Kupascinski ("bad people cannot become good reporters") were the cornerstones of La Jornada's credo.

Chomsky's near two-hour talk to a jam-packed auditorium named for the poet-king Nezahualcoytl (every seat in the house was claimed within 30 minutes of the announcement of the lecture) lazored in on Washington's fading domination of a uni-polar world. Noam ranged far afield: how Barack Obama, the darling of Wall Street, was sold to the North American electorate "like toothpaste or a wonder drug"; the British Empire as the "first international narco-trafficker" (the Opium War); the strategic perils of U.S. bases in Colombia for the Global South. The elderly (82) MIT linguistics pioneer's discourses are often better read on the printed page than pronounced out loud and Chomsky's low-key, nebbishy persona left some attendees dozing despite the dazzling blizzard of data he offered.

Focusing on Washington's crimes around the globe, the talk often approached the world on an west-east power bias rather than south to north, mentioning NATO more than NAFTA with no reference to new Latin Left leaders like Hugo Chavez with whom Chomsky had just huddled. The perennial icon of the U.S. Left also avoided much mention of contemporary Mexican politics, perhaps with an eye out for Constitutional Article 33 that gives the Mexican president carte blanche to kick out any "inconvenient" foreigner. Still, the old gringo's condemnation of free trade, the war on drugs, and neo-liberal economics must have made Felipe Calderon (whose name was never dropped) uncomfortable.

Despite the length of the talk, Chomsky was only twice interrupted with applause - once when he advanced that like the U.S., Mexico was not a "failed state" (a favorite theme) at least for the oligarchy but for millions of the poor who have lost all social protections, the state has, in fact, failed. When Noam Chomsky counseled that the best cure for neo-liberal excess was to confront the rulers with mass mobilizations, the audience again broke into cheers.

As the very professorial Noam Chomsky stepped from the podium he was greeted by Trinidad Ramirez, wife of the imprisoned (113 years) Ignacio del Valle, leader of the Popular Front for the Defense of the Land, who tied a red kerchief around his neck and presented him with the emblematic machete of the farmers of San Salvador Atenco who count 13 political prisoners among their ranks.

After 25 years and upwards of 9000 editions, La Jornada has forcefully disproved one of Noam Chomsky's pet thesis: that an independent media cannot survive in a corporate-dominated press. "You've proven me wrong," the old professor sheepishly confessed during a visit to the paper's Spartan headquarters in the south of the city.

"9000 editions! You've got be kidding!" Vicente Ramirez marveled in his cramped little newspaper kiosk, whipping out his pocket computer. "Lets see - 9000 editions at 10 pesos a piece times 20. That's 1,800,000 pesos! Happy Birthday! La Jornada has been very good to me."

John Ross' monstrous "El Monstruo - Dread & Redemption In Mexico City" will hit the streets in November (to read raving reviews from the likes of Mike Davis and Jeremy Scahill go to www.nationbooks.org.) Ross will be traveling Gringolandia much of 2009-2010 with "El Monstruo" and his new Haymarket title "Iraqigirl", the diary of a teenager growing up under U.S. occupation. If you have a venue for presentations he would like to talk to you at johnross@igc.org

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