5/30/07_Truth,
Fiction and Lou Dobbs
-NYTIMES.com
The
whole controversy involving Lou Dobbs and leprosy
started with a “60 Minutes” segment a
few weeks ago.
The
segment was a profile of Mr. Dobbs, and while doing
background research for it, a “60 Minutes”
producer came across a 2005 news report from Mr.
Dobbs’s CNN program on contagious diseases.
In the report, one of Mr. Dobbs’s correspondents
said there had been 7,000 cases of leprosy in this
country over the previous three years, far more
than in the past.
When
Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” sat down
to interview Mr. Dobbs on camera, she mentioned
the report and told him that there didn’t seem
to be much evidence for it.
“Well,
I can tell you this,” he replied. “If
we reported it, it’s a fact.”
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5/24/07_Becoming
Imperialist
-counterpunch.com
Consider
these familiar assertions:
1. If Donald Rumsfeld had listened to the generals
and invaded with more troops, Iraq would be stable
today.
2. If the U.S. had provided security and basic services
after the initial invasion, Iraqis would have embraced
America's presence and agenda by now.
3. If Paul Bremer had neither de-Ba'athified nor
disbanded the Iraqi army after the invasion, the
insurgency would have been manageable or non-existent.
If
you agree with any of these claims, you are an unwitting
participant in American Imperialism. You criticize
the "handling of the war" but you display
faith in the capacity of the US to remake the world
in its image through military force and administration.
Such faith reinforces the logic of imperialist misadventures
like Iraq, and paves the way for future ones. This
illustrates an important feature of the discourse
surrounding the war: In the wake of failed imperialist
projects, critics often leave military imperialism
itself unquestioned and unchallenged. Indeed, they
participate in its rehabilitation.
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4/03/07_Mexika
Calendar Now Available For Download!
The
calendar for the year Chikyei Akatl (8 Reed) is now
available as a pdf!
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12/07/06_Maya
Indians wary of `Apocalypto'
-news.yahoo.com
MEXICO
CITY - Scenes of enslaved Maya Indians building
temples for a violent, decadent culture in Mel Gibson's
new film "Apocalypto" may ring true for
many of today's Mayas, who earn meager wages in
construction camps, building huge tourist resorts
on land they once owned.
Some
Mayas are excited at the prospect of the first feature
film made in their native tongue, Yucatec Maya.
But others among the 800,000 surviving Mayans are
worried that Gibson's hyper-violent, apocalyptic
film could be just the latest misreading of their
culture by outsiders.
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12/01/06_Mad
Mel and the Maya
-thenation.com-
On
the Yucatán peninsula, where many of the Maya
of Mexico live, there is an often-told story about
people like Mel Gibson, whose bloody movie in the
Yucatecan Maya language, Apocalypto, will be released
December 8. I first heard the story from Miguel Angel
May May, a tall man among the Maya, handsome, now
in his 40s, with a touch of gray in his hair. He speaks
Yucatecan Maya so eloquently that when young people
who have begun to lose their language and culture
first hear him, they shed tears for what has been
and what can be in the Yucatán.
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4/27/06_May
1st and America's New Race War
-CounterPunch.org-
We
can no longer use the term loosely --America’s
war against migrants is real, and the nation’s
rulers mean to sweep the nation’s barrios the
way Katrina swept the Black wards of New Orleans.
And like the military operations visited upon the
Black population of that city in the wake of the winds
and floods, the war against migrants is a race war
--one directed from the highest levels of power.
The
recent strikes by ICE against migrant workplaces
in dozens of cities across 26 states served as a
crystal clear declaration: no matter what immigration
bill passes in Washington, “enforcement”
is the order of the day.
Whoever
the government “legalizes,” it means to
round up the rest in massive raids, ship them en
masse to detention camps, then deport them, creating
an atmosphere of mass repression and terror among
brown people nationwide. Everyone with brown skin
will be targeted. The only question still on the
table is who will be directly subject to deportation.
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