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Today's
Stories
March 22 /
23, 2008
Ralph Nader
Bush
Blisteres the Truth on Iraq
March 21, 2008
Marleen Martin
Land
Behind Bars: the Hidden Casualties of America's "War on
Crime"
Peter Montague
Run
Your Car on Coal? Maybe Not
Saul Landau
Monroe's
Deadly Doctrine
Anis Hamadeh
Merkel in the Knesset
Jacob Hornberger
McCain's Al Qaeda Scare: Slip or Tactic?
Khalil Nakhleh
Al Nakba of 1948: How Long Will It Persist?
Adam Isacson
Colombia, Paramilitary Threats and Assassinations
Kenneth Couesbouc
Money for Nothing
Madis Senner
Will the Feds Underwrite the Stock Market?
Monica Benderman
The Costs of Freedom: What Are You Willing to Pay?
Website of the Day
Stop Foreclosures and Evictions
March 20, 2008
Damien Millet
/
Eric Toussaint
The
Triple Failing of the Big Private Banks
Mike Whitney
Winding
Up Bear
John Ross
What Do We Owe Iraq?
Dave Lindorff
Paying the Piper: the Bodies and Bills are Piling Up
Wajahat Ali
Pakistan on Fire
Jill Nagle
Memo to Sex Workers: Stop Financing Shock Journalism
Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Obama and the Psychic Auto-Shrink-Wrapping Called Race in America
Dan La Botz
Obama's Race Speech
Robert Weissman
Alternative Power: Shutting Down the API
Stella Dallas
/
Jennifer Matsui
Apostasy Now! Mamet, Enter Stage Right
Website of the Day
The Angry Monk
March 19, 2008
Patrick Cockburn
A
War of Lies
Robert Fisk
The Little Men and the Inferno
Jeff Taylor
Five Years of War in Iraq
Ed Ruggero
From Pinkville to Iraq: the Dark Anniversary of My Lai
Ron Jacobs
Who'll Stop the Rain?
Christopher
Fons
Obama Takes the Race Bait
Sherwood Ross
In Defense of Rev. Wright
Cynthia McKinney
An Urgent Crisis: Confronting America's Racial Disparities
Joshua Frank
The Kool-Aid That Kills
Robert Weissman
Monsanto's Genetic Food Gamble
Walter Brasch
It's a Welfare State--If You're Rich
Yifat Susskind
Iraqi Women Resist the Occupation
Andrew Wimmer
War Demands Its Due
Website of
the Day
Glimpses of Nature
March 18, 2008
David Price
The
Military "Leveraging" of Cultural Knowledge
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Collapse of American Power
Tim Wise
Of National Lies and Racial America: Jeremiah Wright, Barack
Obama and the Unacceptability of Truth
Patrick Cockburn
One of the Most Disastrous Wars Ever Fought
Conn Hallinan
Afghanistan, a River Running Backward
James T. Phillips
Monsters: Past, Present and Wannabe
Uri Avnery
The Killing in Bethlehem
David Macaray
Could Wal-Mart Revive the Labor Movement?
Marjorie Cohn
Beware an Attack on Iran
Peter Zinn
Obama in New Orleans
Dan La Botz
The Economic Crisis, Labor and the Left
Monica Benderman
Where are We Going?
March 17, 2008
Pam Martens
The
Fed's Wall Street Dilemma
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The US, Iran and the Policy of Dual Containment
Nelson P. Valdés
The Imperial Branding of Simon Bolivar and the Cuban Revolution
Peter Morici
The Corrosive Consequences of the Trade Deficit
Wajahat Ali
Disrobing the Nine: a Conversation with Jeffrey Toobin on the
Supreme Court Since 9/11
Ronnie Cummins
Beyond Progressive Malpractice: Taking Down Big Pharma
Shaun Harkin
Saint Patrick's Day in Fortress America
Ali Khan
No Pardon for Musharraf
Robert Jensen
Beyond Peace
P. Sainath
Oh, What a Lovely Waiver!
Greg Moses
Jeremiah was a Bullhorn
Dr. Susan Block
Advice for Eliot Spitzer
Website of the Day
No Cowboys
March 15 /
16, 2008
Patrick Cockburn
How
to Destroy a Country in Five Years
Mike Whitney
Bearly
Alive: Investment Giant Rushed to ICU by Panicky Fed Chief
Ralph Nader
Of
Laws and Men
Robert Pollin
It's Still the Economy, Stupid
Diane Christian
The Poetics of Perversity: From Boccaccio to Spitzer
Wajahat Ali
Faking the Hood: a Conversation with Ishmael Reed
Tom Wright
/
Therese Saliba
Rachel Corrie's Case for Justice
Alan Farago
Back to Florida: Where Bushtime Began
Greg Moses
Raiding the Family Room in Texas
Michael Hudson
A Grand Global Bargain?
Martha Rosenberg
Why Hillary's Favorite Chicken Company is Eying China
John Goekler
Fourth Generation Warfare in a Fifth Generation Conflict
Uzma Aslam
Khan
A Letter to Barack Obama: Where's the Change, Barack?
Oren Ben-Dor
The Silencing of Gilad Atzmon
David Underhill
Mammon, Morals and the Mobile Tanker Deal
Fred Gardner
The Education of Eliot Spitzer
David Michael
Green
Why Spitzer Should Have Resigned (and Why He Shouldn't Have)
Rev. William E. Alberts
Jesus, Entombed in Heaven
Gail Dines
It's All About the John: Prostitution and Male Power
David Yearsley
Conducting, Anarchy and the Problem of When to Begin
Chris Clarke
Walking with Zeke: the Luckiest of Dogs
Poets' Basement
Anderson, Lodge & Subiet
Website of
the Day
Deviant Art
March 14, 2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
Watching
the Dollar Die
Don Santina
Vichy
Democrats: Pelosi and the Politics of Collaboration
Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi
Mother Vows Revenge on US: How She Lost Her Husband and Her Sons
Tim Rinne
StratCom
Rules! The Next War Will Start in Nebraska
Robert Fantina
In
Torture We Trust
Saul Landau
Letter
to the Presidents-in-Waitings
David Macaray
Common
Myths About Labor Unions
Franklin Lamb
Is
the Bush Administration Switching Horses in Lebanon
Michael Neumann
The
One State Illusion: Reply to My Critics
March 13, 2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
Republicans
and "Free Market" Zealots Bring Disaster to America
Mike Whitney
Meltdown
Looms Larger As Credit Markets Freeze
Assaf Kfoury
"One-State
or Two State?"- Sterile Debate on False Alternatives
Andy Worthington
Afghan
Hero Who Died in Guantánamo: The Background to the Story
Adam Federman
From
Autopia to Autogeddon: Cars Reach the End of the Road
March 12, 2008
Dave Lindorff
Bringing
Down Spitzer: It's the Big Brother Who Should Bother US
R.F. Blader
The
Spitzer Backlash
Yonatan Mendel
How
to be an Israeli Journalist. Never Write "Murder" or
"Palestine"
Jonathan Cook
One
State or Two? Neither. The Issue is Zionism
Bill and Kathy
Christison
Fallon
and Gates -- At Least One Cheer
James J. Brittain
Was
the U.S. Involved in Killing the FARC-EP Leaders
Ron Jacobs
"All
the Money You Make Will Never Buy Back Your Soul"
March 11, 2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
How
to End the Subprime Crisis
Ed O'Loughlin
How
Israeli Troops Invade Homes in Gaza, Brutalize, Smash and Steal
Ramzy Baroud
'Unwavering
Commitment' to Inequality
Kathy Christison
One
State or Two? The Debate Over Israel and Palestine
China Hand
PRC
Plays it Cool, as U.S. Tries to Amp Up Pressure on Iran
John Joslin
Thank
You, Nafta! Welcome to Weirton, Home of the Discount Cigarette
Mike Averko
Serb
Politics, Kosovo and the Moscow-Washington Divide
Ben Rosenfeld
Gavin
Newsom's Kneejerk Plan
Thierry Paquot
High
Rise, Low Spirits:The Curse of the Tower Block
March 10, 2008
Uri Avnery
"Kill
A Hundred Turks and Rest": The Five-Day War in Gaza
Col. Dan Smith
Scoring
the "Surge" and What Lies Beyond
R.F. Blader
Why
"Lock Them Up and Throw Away the Key" is Losing its
Sheen
Michael Neumann
The
One-State Illusion: More is Less
Bob Fitrakis
and Harvey Wasserman
Did
the Republicans Give Hillary Her Victory in Ohio?
James J. Brittain
Anti-Uribe
Protests in Colombia and the World
Missy Comley
Beattie
The
Passion of John McCain
March 8-9,
2008 Weekend Edition
JoAnn Wypijewski
The
Only Way to Fight the Clintons
Mike Whitney
Sorting
Through the Rubble in Post Bubble America
Peter Morici
Fed
and Treasury Fiddle as Economy Plummets
Ralph Nader
The
Silent Violence of Gaza's Suffering that Candidates Ignore
Jonathan Cook
The
Meaning of Gaza's Shoah
Steve Niva
Behind
the Israeli Escalation in Gaza
Bill and Kathy
Christison
Crisis
over Teheran's Alleged Nuclear Plans Nearing Climax
Hervé
Do Alto and Franck Poupeau
Bolivia:
Morales is Checked
Eric Walberg
To
Leave and Stay at the Same Time: Putin to Medvedev to…?
Scott Johnson
City
of A Thousand Foreclosures
Mark Scaramella
James
Brown's Gate
Bill Clinton
President
Clinton's Remarks on Naming William M. Daley as NAFTA Task Force
Chairman
Poet's Basement
St.
Thomasino, Engel, Davies and Willson
Website of
the Weekend
Hillary
Blackens Barack
March 7, 2008
Patrick Cockburn
Why
Iraq Could Blow-Up in John McCain's Face
Robin Blackburn
Question
for Barrack Obama: Why Afghanistan is the 'Right War'?
Saul Landau
The
Stupid Economy
Binoy Kampmark
When
Competition is Good: McCain and the Muddled Democrats
Chris Floyd
Crushing
the Ants: Admiral Fallon and His Empire
Andy Worthington
Spanish
Drop "Inhuman" Extradition Request for Guantánamo
Britons
Will Potter
Before
the Smoke Even Clears in Seattle: Bringing Out the T Word
March 6, 2008
March 6, 2008
Vincent Navarro
The
Next Failure of Health Reform
Forrest Hylton
High Stakes in the Andes: Colombia's Cornered President
Peter Morici
Why the Dollar is So Cheap
George Ciccariello-Maher
Counter-Attack of the Bureaucrats
John Ross
Taxi! Taxi! The Dark Side of the Oscars
Jacob Hornberger
No Standing to Lecture on Justice
Paul Watson
Illegal Japanese Whaling by the Numbers
Dan Bacher
Off the Deep End
Website of the Day
A Katrina Reader Online
March 5, 2008
Cockburn /
St. Clair
A
Great Day for John McCain (and Maybe Nader)
Joanne Mariner
After Guantanamo
Fidel Castro
The Raid on Ecuador: Underestimating Rafael Correa
Christopher
Brauchli
The Turkish Invasions
Steven Sherman
Obama and the Prospects for a Renewal of the Left
Dave Lindorff
Busting Bush & Co. in New England
James Murren
Bombing Somalia
Adam Engel
Necropolis Now
Website of Day
Remember Song
March 4, 2008
Wajahat Ali
Mumbo
Jumbo: Naming Names with Ishmael Reed
William Blum
How Could Hillary Have Known?
Bill Quigley
The Cleansing of New Orleans
Ralph Nader
The Prince Harry Solution
Patrick Irelan
Oil and Health in Venezuela
James J. Brittain
/
R. James Sacouman
Uribe's Colombia is Destabilizing a New Latin America
Norman Solomon
The War Election
Jacob Hornberger
Hillary in Waco: the Missing Apology
Andy Worthington
Guantánamo and the European Parliament
Mike Averko
Kosovo and the Press
Website of the Day
Tex-Mex Primary
March 3, 2008
Jennifer Loewenstein
Gazan Holocaust
Alan Farago
American Politics and the Faltering Economy
Richard Gott
Colombian Deaths in Ecuador
Wajahat Ali
Who Speaks for a Billion Muslims? Analyzing the World Gallup
Poll with John Esposito
Paul Craig Roberts
The Mukasey Conspiracy: a Bi-Partisan Attack on the Constitution
Robert Weissman
When Multinationals Say Adieu
Uri Avnery
Good Morning, Hamas
Martha Rosenberg
When Your Meat is a Downer
Eva Liddell
Leave the Next Dance for Bill
Michael Donnelly
Will Ferrell Does Flint
Website of the Day
Muddy Waters: Train Fare Home Blues
March 1 / 2,
2008
Alexander Cockburn
The
Race Card
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Political Trial of Don Siegelman
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Nader the Best Antidote to American Imperialism
Nelson P. Valdés
Cuba After Fidel
Christopher Brauchli
Meet Mr. Nursultan Nazarbayev: Friend of Bill, George and Dick
Ron Jacobs
Inside the Secret City: Bomb Making at Oak Ridge
John Ross
The New Conquistadores: Spain's Reconquest of Mexico
Robert Fantina
Posturing Over Patriotism: Obama and Those Lapel Pins
Robert Weissman
Hidden in Plain Sight: Human Rights Hypocrisy
Mohammed Omer
Fear in Gaza
Remi Kanazi
Barack Obama and the Politics of Xenophobia
Bob Jackson
Why is Yellowstone Destroying Its Bison Herd?
Richard Rhames
Casual Threats: Loaded with Mercury
Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Awaits the Arrival of the USS Cole
Rannie Amiri
Showboat Diplomacy: US Warships Steam Toward Lebanon
David Michael
Green
The Three Faces of Hillary: the Politics of Flim-Flam
Conn Hallinan
Notes from the Southern Cone
Faheem Hussain
Prince Harry of Afghanistan and the Meaning of Normalcy
Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Gardner and Ford
Website of
the Weekend
The Palestine Chronicle Needs (and Deserves) Your Help!
February 29,
2008
Matt Gonzalez
The
Obama Craze
Jonathan Cook
Academic Freedom? Not for Arabs in Israel
Joshua Frank
Obama and Israel
Anthony DiMaggio
The Unilateral Presidency: Signing Statements and the Rollback
of American Law
Linn Washington, Jr.
Cop Abuse in America
Binoy Kampmark
Hubris and Nemesis
Robert Bryce
Energy Efficiency May be a Good Thing, But It Won't Cut Energy
Use
Sonja Karkar
Australia's Government Continues Its Love Affair with Israel
Dave Lindorff
A Manchurian Candidate in the White House? Obama or Bush?
Website of
the Day
Olduvai George
February 28,
2008
Patrick Cockburn
"Iraq"
Falls Apart
Fred Gardner
The Birth of NAFTA
Michael Levitin
The Crisis in Kosovo is Just Beginning
William S.
Lind
The Fake State of Kosovo
David Macaray
A Ray of Hope for Organized Labor
Stephen Fleischman
Nader's Latest Run: Monkey Wrench or Cattle Prod?
George Wuerthner
The Myths of Forest Health: Why Ecological Logging is an Oxymoron
Laura Carlsen
The North American Union Farce
Carl Finamore
Why the Delta-Northwest Deal Hasn't Taken Off
Michael Dickinson
The Day I Bombed the House of Commons
Website of the Day
Plane Stupid
February 27,
2008
David Rosen
Playing
the Race Card: Obama, Love Across the Color Line and Political
Dirty Tricks
Vijay Prashad
Bomber John: McCain and the 100 Year War
Harvey Wasserman
Incident at Turkey Point: Did Florida Go to the Radioactive Brink?
Andy Worthington
Guantánamo's Shambolic Trials: Pentagon Boss Resigns,
Ex-Prosecutor Joins Defense
Wajahat Ali
Pakistan for Sale: an Interview with Ayesha Siddiqa on Pakistan's
Military Economy
Peter Morici
The Auction-Rate Securities Fiasco: a Drama of Greed and Betrayal
Stephen Philion
Conspiracy Theory, Fears of Betrayal and Today's Anti-War Movement
Michael Donnelly
Obama by Unanimous Decision
Erica Rosenberg /
Janine Blaeloch
After the Land Deals: Will There
be Any Wilderness Left to Protect?
Website of
the Day
Dress Blues
February 26,
2008
Debbie Nathan
Confessions
of a Gitmo Guard
Alan Dershowitz
v. Frank Menetrez
On Finkelstein
Harvey Wasserman
How Ohio Got Nuked
Michael Colby
Ralph Nader vs. the Fundamentalist Liberals
Gary Leupp
Condi vs. Putin on Bullying Belgrade
David Orchard
The New Conquistadors: Canada in Afghanistan
Martha Rosenberg
The Big HRT
Fran Shor
The Electoral Circus and Nader's Sideshow
Serge Halimi
The Dom Perignon Socialist Manifesto: Bernard Henri-Levy's Plan
for the French Left
Global Balkans
Neo-Liberalism and Protectorate States in the Post-Yugoslav Balkans:
an Interview with Tariq Ali
Website of
the Day
Texistentialism
February 25,
2008
Roger Morris
A
Death in Damascus
Anthony DiMaggio
Military
Bases, the Media and the Democrats
Ralph Nader
Why I'm Running
Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Broils
Paul Craig Roberts
Kosovo and the Empire Crazies
Peter Morici
Bernanke's Failing Policies: a Long Recession Looms
Dave Lindorff
General Welch's Whitewash: What We Still Don't Know About That
Minot Nuke Incident
Saul Landau
/
Farrah Hassen
Fanatics, Mountebanks and Drillers: a Bloody Oil Film
Heather Gray
James Orange, Civil Rights Legend
Robert Weitzel
Accomodating Torture
John Halle
Kucinich Goes Down
Website of the Day
Do the Trunk Monkey!
February 23 / 4, 2008
Alexander Cockburn
The
Mushrooming Clouds That Hang Over McCain
Paul Craig
Roberts
Obama
and Global Trade
Wajahat Ali
Omissions of the Commission: an Interview with Phillip Shenon
on the 9/11 Commission
Ralph Nader
Neutering the FDA
Jürgen
Vsych
"What Was Ralph Nader Thinking?"
Fidel Castro
Watching the US Presidential Campaign from Havana
Andy Worthington
Britain's Guantánamo
David Macaray
Unions Under Assault
Jeremy Scahill
The Real Story Behind Kosovo's Independence
David Krieger
Stanley Sheinbaum
Caging the Cold War Monster
Ron Jacobs
Building for the Future
Michael Garrity
The Last, Best Hope for the Northern Rockies
Brian McKenna
Higher Ed's "Civic Engagements" Get Dumbed Down
Missy Beattie
Over the Hill with John McCain
Fred Gardner
American College of Physicians Takes Pro-Cannabis Stand (Mostly)
Boris Kagarlitsky
The Growth of the Russian Labor Movement
Mike Ferner
Kick That Barrel
Dan Bacher
On the Trail with the Border Angels
Christopher
Ketcham
Hillary Goes Where Obama Fears to Tread
Poets' Basement
Davies and Buknatski
Website of
the Weekend
Obama
Mariachi
February 22,
2008
Mike Whitney
The
Bonfire of Capital
Jason Hribal
Elephants and the Circus: The Story of Janet
Liaquat Ali Khan
Arresting Musharraf
Joshua Frank
That Obama Glow: the Nuclear Industry's Golden Child
Dave Lindorff
Vicki's John: Ask Not What She Did for Him, Ask What He Did for
Her!
Liliana Segura
When Torture is Old News: McCain's Blonde Diversion
Robert Fantina
Castro, Bush and Cuba: a Fiasco Waiting to Happen?
Yifat Susskind
The ABCs of Death: Bush vs. Africa's Women
Norm Kent
Pushing 60 with Pot
Website of
the Day
Bush Gets Down in Liberia
February 21,
2008
Saul Landau
Fidel
Steps Aside
Elizabeth Schulte
Left Behind, With No End in Sight: America's Long-Term Unemployed
Helen Redmond
Health Care as a Human Right
Benjamin Dangl
Undermining Bolivia
Michael Levitin
Kosovo's Dilemma
Liam Leonard
Fear and Loathing on the Emerald Isle
Patrick Irelan
Land and Food in Venezuela
Linn Cohen-Cole
Poor Ohio: a Second Letter to Hillary on Her Ties to Monsanto
Michael Simmons
Daydream Believer: John Stewart, the Miles Davis of Folk Music
CounterPunch
News Service
A Message from the Women of Okinawa to US GIs
Website of the Day
Cop Abuse in Shreveport
|
Weekend
Edition
March 22 / 23, 2008
Land Tenure in
a Tri-Partite Culture
Rethinking
New Mexico History
By SETH SANDRONSKY
In 1967 author, historian, human rights
activist and professor Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was working on a
Ph.D. in Latin American history at UCLA when a TV report drew
her attention. Armed men of the Alianza Federal de Pueblos Libres
had captured a small town's courthouse in northern New Mexico.
This is what happens in Latin America, she thought, not the U.S.
Wait a minute, Dunbar-Oritiz continued, that was the historic
name for a place in the U.S. She writes of this contradiction
and others in a paperback version with a new chapter of her 1980
book Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico
(University of Oklahoma Press, September, 2007). In it, she delivers
a "socioeconomic interpretation" of New Mexico's "historically
dynamic peoples," Pueblo Indian and Mexican, to the present.
Prior to Spanish colonialists'
arrival in the late 16th century, Pueblo Indians for three centuries
lived and worked on land with "intensive irrigation farming"
and "kinship associations and a religious superstructure
intimately related to agricultural seasons." Pueblos, reliant
upon the Río Grande and the river tributaries, were part
of a far-reaching network of producing and trading peoples in
this area of North America. Such communal self-provisioning societies
preceded the Pueblos' by 20 centuries, writes Dunbar-Ortiz.
Eight decades of Spanish colonialism upended Pueblo life. The
colonialists brought enslaved Africans and Indians from Mexico,
cattle and horses. This intrusion wrecked the dirt irrigation
ditches of the Pueblos. Meanwhile, Franciscans friars tried to
Christianize them. Pueblo villages declined from 98 to 23 under
the savage culture of Spanish military violence. Marx termed
imperialists' armed theft of land, labor and resources "primitive
accumulation" in Vol. 1 of Capital. His  theory of capitalism's origin informs Roots of
Resistance. In fact, Dunbar-Ortiz' application of Marx's work
to colonialism and the resistance it spawned in New Mexico helps
readers to better understand the relevance of his materialist
framework.
In 1680, a Pueblo-led uprising, planned for generations, Dunbar-Ortiz
writes, drove out the foreigners for 13 years. After a re-conquest,
Spanish rulers, mindful of their previous ouster, chose a policy
of community land grants to detribalized Indian, and mestizo
and mulatto residents. Spaniard's called this group of about
15,000 people genízaros. They were a low-income populace
living on the colony frontiers under colonial Spain's rigid theocracy.
The genízaros bore some similarities to poor, rural whites
like the Scots-Irish, "foot soldiers" of the British
and American empires. Dunbar-Ortiz' details the triumphs and
tragedies of these soldiers in her poignant memoir Red Dirt:
Growing Up Okie (Verso, 1997).
The Spanish caste system had 32 degrees, with Indians on the
bottom then Africans, according to Dunbar-Ortiz. This system
of racial oppression as a tool of social control helped to lay
the groundwork for future conflicts between colonized people
in New Mexico. Her point is that grasping race, or ethnicity,
should dovetail with a critique of social class, is well taken.
Emerging from the radical popular movements of the 1960s she
shares in her second memoir Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War
Years, 1960-1975 (City Lights Publishers, 2002), Dunbar-Ortiz
expands the role of class as an analytic framework for gender
and racial oppressions. She writes in the radical tradition of
U.S. historian David Roediger, who explores the material and
ideological links between race and class formation in his work.
Most recently, that includes Colored White: Transcending the
Racial Past (University of California Press, 2002) and Working
Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The
Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (Basic Books,
2005).
The secular Republic of Mexico emerged in 1821. It expelled the
Catholic Church and the Spanish caste system. The people of New
Mexico became Mexican citizens. And the contradictions of capitalism
intervening through colonialism festered. At one pole was an
upper class organized around the American Party of Taos, which
accumulated land-grant acreage. These elites did business with
Kit Carson and other U.S. merchants. Together, they upset the
markets of small farmers and traders. The U.S., the richest state
in the Western Hemisphere then, turned village life in New Mexico
upside down, Dunbar-Ortiz explains. Likewise, the NAFTA, begun
New Year's Day 1994 under Democratic President Bill Clinton,
has devastated Mexico's small corn farmers. The winners, U.S.
corporate agriculture, is flooding Mexican communities, pushing
people north to the U.S. labor market, where dreadful work conditions
and political exploitation spawn a noxious witches' brew.
Manifest Destiny, the ideology of U.S. empire based on the 1787
Northwest Ordinance, sparked war against Mexico in 1846. Though
defeated by the American invaders, Mexico negotiated the 1848
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Crucially, it guarantees the property
rights of Mexican citizens and their heirs to ownership of their
land "equally ample as if the same belonged to citizens
of the United States," Dunbar-Ortiz explains. Spanish colonists
had seized that from Pueblo peoples, which became the basis of
Spain's land-tenure policy. The absence of this clarification
in standard history reveals its importance to the prevailing
imperial ideology of "tragic" American military interventions,
from Iraq's March 2003 invasion and well before that.
Dunbar Ortiz places the land question in the New Mexico of the
19th century squarely within the colonial trends underway on
other continents. In this way, she analyzes capitalist imperialism
as a global system. While the Treaty also prevents the sale of
public lands to private hands, Dunbar-Ortiz details how this
promise of protected property rights was repeatedly broken, with
the federal government failing to protect the original land grantees.
Pueblo Indians and Mexican villagers suffered grievously. The
U.S. legal profession played a decisive role in this land transfer.
One example is American lawyers' use of power of attorney agreements
to deprive Mexican farmers from using the commons for sheep-grazing.
Capitalist land speculators such as Thomas B. Catron, also a
territorial politician in New Mexico, grabbed crucial grazing
lands adjacent to the estimated 2 to 3 million acres he also
acquired.
New Mexico, ruled as a U.S. territory until 1912, served
as a place for Catron and other investors in the mining and railroad
industries to grow their capital. Dunbar-Ortiz clarifies the
process, driven to expand over space and time, clashed with older
practices and views of subsistence land use. The central role
of the state loomed large. For instance, in New Mexico, U.S.
congressional policy denied the ownership of commons, or land
for public use. Meanwhile, an elite class of Hispanic New Mexicans
prospered. One group's gain illustrates in part the region's
class and race divide. U.S. policy of creating dreadful agrarian
conditions exacerbated the class divisions.
Throughout the book, her analysis shines clarity where fog lingers
concerning native people's relations to the land and one another
in this part of the American Southwest. "The pervading racism
bred by colonialism has tended to cloud the land issue in northern
New Mexico, producing the view that it is a product of cultural
differences rather than a product of basic economic processes
within a capitalist society."
Major government intervention into the reputed "free market"
economy harms those in the lower social classes with grim regularity.
Various U.S. agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service end up
owning 40 percent of New Mexico's communal land grants. Los Alamos
is the site of the U.S. Manhattan Project that developed the
atomic bomb. Crucially, this same area is Pueblos' ancestral
land, from which they are excluded from using now. This pattern
is essential to capitalism's "laws of motion" which
deprive people of such self-sufficiency. This trend, which dates
from the enclosure movements in pre-industrial Europe, propels
farmers into selling their labor services for money, which investment
capital requires for growth.
Dunbar-Ortiz writes: "During the twentieth century, economic
development in northern New Mexico moved towards a capitalist
economy within the economic system of the United States with
an almost total proletarianization of agricultural producers.
However, the persistence of the Mexican villages, the Pueblos'
winning of U.S. federal trust protection and securing of their
lands, the existence of the Mescalero and Jicarilla Apache reservations,
and the resource-rich part of the Navajo reservation in New Mexico
are factors that created a counterforce to unlimited monopoly
capital development. Land, water, and mineral sources were still
the essential capitalist commodities in the area."
Her final chapter is new. In it she weaves the global indigenous
people's movement into her analysis and narrative of New Mexico.
Two movements stand out: the American Indian Movement of the
1960s and the international indigenous opposition to the 1992
Columbus Quincentenary. Both were inclusive of multiple struggles,
from Latin and Central America to the African continent, exploding
the ruling ideology that alternatives to the status quo of capital's
rule over society are a kind of fantasy. That momentum continues.
Dunbar-Ortiz writes: "The issues activist Pueblos and their
allies are raising in New Mexico, however harsh and conflictive
those issues may be, have much to contribute toward a transformative
discussion of struggles for economic, cultural, and social justice
in the United States."
Dunbar-Ortiz' documentation is thorough. She references archival
and published primary and secondary sources, articles, books,
court cases, legislation, monographs, government reports and
United Nations documents. Teens and adults, young and old, can
gain from the insights and scholarship in her book. It deserves
widespread attention.
Seth Sandronsky lives and writes in Sacramento ssandronsky@yahoo.com.
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