Immigrants as chattel

Extremist U.S. Congressman Steve King (R/Idaho) is suggesting that an electrifed border fence be erected along the southern U.S. border.

An electric fence is an interesting idea; that's the sort of device one employs to control the movement of draught animals, which, when you think about it, is about the way that immigrant workers are thought of in the U.S.

The term used is, to "get a Mexican."

By the way, if Congressman King's name rings a bell, it may be because King's the same guy who compared the Abu Ghraib torture (horrific images linked behind the word torture, FYI) to "hazing."

Then again, perhaps it can warp ones perspective when ones last name is literally synonymous with imperialism.

Billmon on Al

Billmon has a typically perspicacious post today on Al Gore's environmental-disaster epic.

He uses the film as a jumping-off point to discuss what he describes as the post-Enlightenment tendencies in American cultural life. As usual, his insights are penetrating, and in the balance, I agree with his assessment.

I've also read a number of attacks on Gore from his left, which take him to task for hypocrisy, and which betray other problems that infects the American body politic: the desire for some Superman, free of all ignominy and vice; and the tendency of Americans to work politically primarily with people they agree with.

The sad thing is, there are any number of real issues on which many Americans actually can and do agree, but which get overlooked due to the political desire to only play with the cool kids. This takes on many forms, but perhaps my favorite was the vilification of Nader voters after 2000, as though they, rather than Bush voters and Supreme Court chicanery, were responsible for Bush's ascent to the Presidency.

Point being, I hope progressives and Americans can relinquish their squabbling long enough to accomplish something together.

Los Angeles Times vs. the So-Called "People" of Mexico

The LA Times has a particularly silly editorial today, entitled Nail-biting time in Mexico.

The subtitle is priceless as well: "Election standoff reveals a populist candidate with undemocratic leanings." I'll wait a moment while you attempt futilely to resolve the notion of a populist being somehow un-democratic, then collapse howling with derisive laughter.

Done? Ok, then...

It seems that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has shown contempt for democracy by --horrors-- suggesting that the votes should be re-counted, and this in an election where the majority winner eked out a victory with perhaps less than 1% margin over Obrador.

The Times on the story:

ON SUNDAY NIGHT, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador showed why he probably would not make a great president of Mexico. A few hours after the polls closed, and moments after independent electoral authorities announced that the race was too close to call, the leftist former mayor of Mexico City took to the airwaves to declare himself the winner, by half a million votes.

Uhm, yeah, well, so did his rival, who, it seems, got perhaps the same number of votes. Back to Times on Obrador:

He urged election officials to "confirm our results" and pledged, menacingly, to protect the people's verdict.

The degree to which Lopez Obrador is a demagogue who considers himself above the law was a question debated throughout the campaign. His actions after the polls closed provided a definitive answer.

That action? Obrador vowed to employ "all legal means" to ensure the votes were counted, and spoke of respecting the process and institutions. Wierdly, this quote - which I heard via radio as well - got scrubbed from the Washington Times version of the story. Compare this to this.

Back to the LA Times:

Fortunately for Mexico, Lopez Obrador appears to have lost this three-way cliffhanger — by no more than 1 percentage point — to conservative candidate Felipe Calderon of the National Action Party. (By law, President Vicente Fox, the current leader of the party, could not seek a second term.)

In fact, nearly 2/3 of Mexico's electorate rejected Fox's heir apparent and partymate, voting instead for candidates from the other two prominent parties, or not participating at all.

The next president will face some of the same hurdles that thwarted many of Fox's aspirations. Calderon's party will only hold a third of congressional seats, which will make it difficult for the government to push ahead with needed reforms. Mexico's energy sector, to name one prominent example, desperately needs private and foreign investment, but the nationalist, leftist opposition continues to romanticize the notion that "the people" should own the nation's oil reserves.

Three points to make here:

First, Calderon is the former energy secretary in Mexico, so it's telling that the question of energy comes up here.

Second, and even more telling, is the use in the LA Times of quotation marks around the phrase "the people," as though the Mexican people don't actualy exist, except as a figment of the imagination of dastardly west-leaning candidates.

Third, if those "people" creatures exercise that "voting" thing, and decide they prefer to have some nationalized institutions, it's still called "democracy." Duh.

Despite the dashed hopes of the Fox years, it is encouraging that Mexican voters resisted the old-style populism and state interventionism peddled by Lopez Obrador.

Here, again, remember that definition of populism cited earlier:

"A political philosophy supporting the rights and power of the people in their struggle against the privileged elite."

Which is to say, "Don't them gul-durned Messicans know that their national resources are rightly the property of wealthy private concerns located beyond their borders? Uppity Spics."

It isn't just that figment known as "the people" who come in for a drubbing:

And for all the talk that Fox achieved little in his six years in office, his responsible economic policies helped provide novel stability, which led to low inflation and the expansion of credit to lower-middle-class voters.

Note here what is described as an expansion of credit to "voters", rather than to "citizens". Here again, word choice counts, and the modern history of the Global South, and particularly Latin America, is riddled with the corpses of lower-middle-class and poor people who are saddled under a burden of debt by their wealthier and whiter neighboors to the north. If only the Messicans had some kind of means of relieving that debt, but alas, they are merely "the people," who, it seems would best avail themselves of "democracy" by outsourcing their national wealth to private and oligarchich interests.

On Sunday, Mexicans faced a clear choice on the right and on the left — a healthy ideological contest for a maturing democracy.

Translation: Oh, it's so cute! The little brown brothers to the south, why, they're almost like a real country or something! Maybe some day they'll grow up to have clean and clear elections like those of us here in the good old U.S. of A.!
To their credit, the Times goes on to make one sane suggestion: that there be run-off elections in the case of unclear outcomes (would have been great if they'd recommended instant run-offs and preferential voting, but hey, baby steps here), and then goes on to note that "Extremely close elections have a way of testing even the most entrenched democracies, as Americans witnessed in 2000."

Yes, the "entrenched democracy" of America in 2000, onto which the Republican pallbearers were heaping dirt and concrete as quickly as possible.

And yes, it appears that some of the scum who helped steal the American election in 2000 are now helping screw up democracy throughout Latin America, including Mexico.

The other suggestion that the Times makes is: "Now, what Mexican democracy requires is for all the contenders to show more statesmanship and maturity than Lopez Obrador did Sunday night."

News flash to the LA Times: BOTH of the two candidates who got roughly 1/3 of the vote each, declared victory yesterday, so what's with the double standard? If the Times actually wanted to cluck their tongues at Mexican candidates for supposedly sounding unpresidential (whatever the hell that means), they'd have even-handedly dissed Felipe Calderon for doing the same thing that they criticized Obrador for doing. But of course, the Times rhetoric demonstratively had very little to do with what it was actually advocating.

Tossers.

Connections Between the War and the Behavior of its Perpetrators

Billmon has a typically incisive collection of clips that illustrate the similarities between the words of the U.S. Marine corporal who wrote the controversial track, "Hadji Girl," and the story of the rape that other service members alleged planned and undertook recently in Iraq.

This is far from the only connection one could draw. The alleged rape and murder incident reads like the American occupation of Iraq, writ small. Like some horrific variation on a Mandelbrot image, in which each smidgen of the image contains the entirety of the remainder of the image in miniature, the purported attackers of the person and on the family of 15-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza stand in for the occupation itself, in which covetous Western eyes regarded Iraq as a prize to be taken, with the necessary dehumanization and elimination of any persons getting between the aggressors and their goal.

Is it very difficult to imagine that the horrors inflicted on this family were born of a very similar admixture of lust and fear that seems to motivate the authors of the wider war?

It's worth noting that the troops who stand accused of the attack were reportedly familiar with Abeer Qasim Hamza from seeing her at checkpoints along the road. These checkpoints are, themselves, another practice that puts the lie to the suggestion that this occupation has been undertaken for humanitarian reasons. How many supposedly democratic countries can you name in which soldiers of a foreign occupation force staff checkpoints throughout the country and put the preservation of their own lives and well-being ahead of that of the vehicles' occupants? If you counted more than one, you got further than I did.

A quick look at the checkpoints in Iraq tells a pretty ugly story. After three decades under the criminal regime of Saddam Hussein, Iraqis are conditioned to drive quickly past government installations and checkpoints - this was the expected behavior. Nowadays, however, the identical behavior likely to get someone killed. It's yet another case of the U.S. occupiers being ignorant of history and context, and that ignorance leading to fear, which then takes on the form of violence.

Those who defend the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq claim that these troops have a right to defend themselves. Putting aside the smothering irony of deploying this excuse to justify the actions of an illegal army of occupation, let's take a closer look. If, in fact, the U.S. has sent its troops to Iraq to liberate the people, then by definition, the lives of those troops are expendable in the interests of the lives and freedoms of the Iraqi people. If, in fact, the U.S. were to privledge the lives of Iraqis in this situation, it would assume their innocence first upon approaching a checkpoint, rather than assume that they are a threat.

But this theory runs counter to the American policy, and indeed American practice, because the troops are NOT in Iraq for the benefit of the people. The removal of Saddam Hussein from office is a happy side effect of the U.S. invasion there, but that silver lining does not mitigate the storm cloud that is wreaking havoc on the people of Iraq.

Though there's much speculation about the real reasons that the U.S. attacked Iraq, it is possible that the world will never know the reality of the situation, in part because the instigators and planners of the war have no credibility, and in part because even if they were honest (which they assuredly are not), it is dubious that they could muster a case, no matter how rational or irrational, to justify their actions.