Nowtopian

The mother of my daughter, my ex-, Caitlin Manning, just got back from Mexico City (Francesca was with her too, they shot a bunch of video together). Here’s her take on the amazing, and grossly under-reported events going on down there. Love to get comments on this from anyone with their own views, especially if you’ve been down there. It’s incredibly hard to figure it out from the U.S. John Ross has a compelling account in today’s Counterpunch well worth reading too. (John and Caitlin will be appearing at CounterPULSE in San Francisco on Oct. 11 to continue this conversation, which may have gone quite a bit further by then!)

Here’s Caitlin:

I have just returned from a two-week trip to Mexico, where I have witnessed and documented the extraordinary, massive popular movement of civil resistance that has arisen in the wake of electoral fraud that took place on July 2nd. The press in the U.S. has been mostly silent on this historic moment in Mexican history. The city center is occupied by hundreds of thousands of Mexicans from every part of Mexico and all walks of life. They call it: “el planton” which can be loosely translated as “the squat,” and there are also numerous acts of civil disobedience occurring throughout the country in support of the movement. The Mexican people are supporting Manuel Lopez Obrador, the presidential candidate who has been defrauded of the presidency, according to vast evidence and credible sources. The movement is demanding a full recount of the vote (“voto por voto, casilla por casilla”), but this movement goes way beyond electoral issues. People are fed up with 20 years of neoliberalism, which has led to substantial drop in wages, a devastated education system, the rise in Mexico of the super-rich (a high percentage of the world’s millionaires are Mexican), etc. etc.. The movement has united a broad spectrum of autonomous grassroots organizations, social justice workers, poor people, leftist groups, liberal intellectuals, artists organizations, educators and many independent Mexicans who have simply had enough. It is guided by pacifist, civil resistance practices and has millions of supporters around the country. They have taken over the heart of Mexico City in a massive squat: tents line the whole of Reforma corridor, from Petroleos to the Zocalo, and the Zocalo itself is full of encampments. This is a completely unexpected, unprecedented situation in the history of Mexico and has confounded all analysts of Mexican politics, necessitating a thorough reassessment of political positions and theories. If it continues it could have serious international consequences as well, since of course the Bush Administration supports the neoliberal structural adjustment policies of the ruling party (the PAN).

Continue reading Direct from Mexico City

I had to fly this past weekend, luckily just a one-day hop up to Reno, so I didn’t have luggage. That saved me a hour or more of waiting. This preposterous degradation we’re expected to endure every time we fly has really got to stop. The scrutiny has nothing to do with security and everything to do with training us in passive compliance with an authoritarian state.

Ever since the original stupidity started in 2001 I’ve been outraged by the absurdity of the so-called “security” measures taken at airports. They could hardly be less effective! The seizing of nail clippers and other personal items was ridiculous from the get-go, though you could kind of ‘get it’ that small sharp objects might be used for nefarious purposes. But making us all take off our shoes for all these years (are we going to do that forever? looks like it) is the dumbest thing ever, and now the government is holding press conferences trying to justify it as a mandatory policy even though a study from another part of the bureaucracy shows that it is pointless.

Craig Murray, formerly UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, has come out with a decently skeptical piece about the latest propaganda campaign by the increasingly incomprehensible Bush/Blair machines. Several people asked me what I thought of the big announcement last week of the supposed terror plot in England. My first reaction was that it was fake. Murray’s piece makes clear that it was all political propaganda (what with the bad news in Lebanon, Iraq, Connecticut, Parliament, etc.) to change the topic, and of course the mainstream media did their usual stenographic lapdog routine. How anyone can go on giving credence to the mainstream media is WAY beyond me. None of the arrested suspects had a passport, plane ticket, or any bombs… whatever surveillance implicated them was probably largely a police fantasy, but it served its purpose during the three days of headline frenzy to reinforce the illusion that there’s a big war going on and the UK and US are the beleaguered victims barely escaping catastrophe.

I paid no attention, but Billmon did, to a Bush press conference yesterday, in which Bush serves as a PR lackey for the Israelis as they desperately try to avoid the consequences of their invasion’s abject failure. Billmon writes beautifully about the complete breakdown in coherence by Bush, not to mention the glaring set-up he’s imposed on himself when all his triumphant claims about the defeat of Hezbollah and Israel’s great victory are soon shown to be false.

Every time you think the Cheney regime has blown it, they find a way to blow it even more. No matter how blatantly wrong they are, no matter how much their policies fail, they just keep plowing ahead in the same psychotic direction, murdering and bombing under the bizarre idea that they will subdue opposition and win support. We’ve known for 6+ years that madmen had taken over, but it just gets crazier and crazier. Unfortunately, the deaths keep piling higher, the bloody rivers flow ever deeper. If you haven’t already read Sy Hersh’s latest in the New Yorker, I recommend it. He quotes various anonymous CIA and State Dept. people to show that the debacle in Lebanon will be spun as a great success by the Cheney gang, and they’ll use it to further justify their unjustifiable attack on Iran, already well underway in planning and logistics apparently, and set for some time after the November elections. Impeachment would be helpful, but it’s such a slow process and the Democrats are so lame and self-defeating, they’re sure to snatch failure from the jaws of long overdue justice… (On an unrelated California note, can you believe how helpless and uninspiring Phil Angelides looks as the Schwarzenegger campaign colonizes all the statewide media and spins his supposed big turnaround? Talk about pathetic… how do people keep putting money, time and heart into the Democratic Party? Why?…)

Anyway, we need to figure out a way to needle the idiots at the airports, or at least pressure the bigger idiots who have put us all into their Police State Theater of the Absurd. I am almost tempted to quit flying… but wait, we don’t have much of a train system anymore do we? Not much of a bus system either… aaargh.

P.S. AUG. 16: Becky Akers on Alternet has a nice piece following a similar line of thinking called “Abolish the TSA, Save Lives”. Here’s a nice quote:

The TSA has been a farce from its inception. It exists not to prevent terrorists from bringing down a plane but to prevent passengers from realizing the government can do little to thwart such a catastrophe.