ce399 | research archive

Clinton and Company "Talk Tough" on Latin America, related

While President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and their appointees emphasize a return to diplomacy in foreign relations, so far they show little inclination to be diplomatic toward leftist governments in Latin America. In fact, recent comments by Obama, Clinton and recent appointees show a continuation of an antiquated analysis and a lack of understanding of recent Latin American social movements and regional integration. On a visit to the State Department on January 23, Clinton promised “I will do all that I can, working with you, to make it abundantly clear that robust diplomacy and effective development are the best long-term tools for securing America’s future.” Obama made similar assertions in a speech to diplomats, and ‘diplomacy’, symbolizing a return to international peace and prosperity, was the word of the week.

Full Article:

http://rogerhollander.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/hillary-clinton-and-james-steinberg-talk-tough-on-latin-america/

Related Articles:

Evo Morales Responds to Hillary Clinton on Iran: "The United States does not have the moral authority to talk about terrorism and to accuse other nations of promoting it."

EU, sin autoridad moral para hablar de terrorismo: Bolivia

Comentario:

Espero que el administrador me deje pasar, nunca lo hace. Bien por Evo, La Hillary es miembro activo del club Bilderberg, sabe lo que dice y presiona, los pueblos libres le estorban a estos sicopatas, por ello condiciona la ayuda, eso es prostitución. Tal como a México con el plan Mérida, plan cohersitivo y prostituyente, por pocos dolares les damos todo, aun a costa de los mexicanos, que nada les importan. Al menos ellos tienen dignidad, nosotros hemos perdido hasta la verguenza.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4181452#4183049

WSJ hit piece on Bolivia:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB40001424052748704888404574549741582508178.html

Employee of a CIA Front Organization Working in Venezuela was Detained in Cuba This Week

A United States government contract worker, who was distributing cellphones, laptops and other communications equipment in Cuba on behalf of the Obama administration, has been detained by the authorities here, American officials said Friday.

--

DEVELOPMENT ALTERNATIVES INC. IS A CIA FRONT ORGANIZATION

The use of a chain of entities and agencies is a mechanism employed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to channel and filter funding and strategic political support to groups and individuals that support US agenda abroad. The pretext of “promoting democracy” is a modern form of CIA subversion tactics, seeking to infiltrate and penetrate civil society groups and provide funding to encourage “regime change” in strategically important nations, such as Venezuela, with governments unwilling to subcomb to US dominance.

..

Development Alternatives, Inc. is one of the largest US government contractors in the world. Currently, DAI has a $50 million contract in Afghanistan. In Latin America, DAI is presently operating in Bolivia, Brasil, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haití, Honduras, México, Nicaragua, Perú, República Dominicana and Venezuela.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5000

FT Marinetti's "Mechanical Son" and Manifesto of Tactilism (1921)

Likewise, works written at this time - most notably, Mafarka Le Futuriste - abound with images and nonsexual procreation, consistently eliminating the figure of the effeminizing mother. This tendency is expressed programmatically in Marinetti's railings "Against Amore and Parliamentarism" in "War, the World's Only Hygiene": Well then: I confess that before so intoxicating a spectacle we strong Futurists have suddenly felt ourselves suddenly detached from women, who have suddenly become too earthly, or to express it better, have become a symbol of the earth that we ought to abandon. We have even dreamed of one day being able to create a mechanical son, the fruit of pure will, a synthesis of all the laws that science is on the brink of discovering." (Marinetti SW, p75)   

...

The regulation  of sexuality envisaged in this early work, written in the heyday of the productive model of the machine metaphor, is extremely strict: sex serves the function of procreation. Desire is machinic insofar as it motivates (re-)production. 

...

Again, it is with a reference to the organizing metaphor of the machine that one can begin to understand the shift to a degenitalized sensuality. If the early machine concentrates sexual energies on the act of procreation, then the dissociation of the machine from the act of production - its utilization as a model of order rather than as a principle of proliferation - results in a celebration of the technology of creation and necessarily dissociates sexuality from the act of procreation. Sexuality itself becomes the exercising of a power rather than the creation or regeneration of a power in the act of procreation. Thus the "dispersed" sexuality of the Tactilism Manifesto [1921] - though subversive or progressive when viewed purely in terms of discursive divisions that take no account of the subjugation of ideology to the machine metaphor - corresponds to a shift in Marinetti's understanding of the function of the machine and gives expression not to liberational impulses but to an ideology of control at the level of the body. The "efficiency" of the body as machine does not consist, here, in its productivity, but in its full utilization, its functioning at full capacity, every orifice plugged and every inch of epidermis aroused.

Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics and the Avant-Garde by Andrew Hewitt. Pg 150 - 51. ISBN#

The US Military's Mapping of Mexico's Indigenous Communities

An investigative report into Kansas University's D.O.D. funded mapping project of indigenous land in Oaxaca and San Luis Potosi. By Simon Sedillo

An edited and abridged version of the article "The Demarest Factor: The Ethics of U.S. Department of Defense Funding for Academic Research in Mexico" by Simon Sedillo, of www.elenemigocomun.net.

Background

Lawrence Journal World published an article (October 2006) which quietly uncovered a funding scandal at Kansas University.  In 2005, the Department of Geography received at minimum $500,000 in Department of Defense funds to map communally-held indigenous lands held in San Luis Potosi and Oaxaca, Mexico.

Piqued by LJ World's article, elenemigocomun published a follow-up story "The Road to Hell" (9/26/2007) elaborating upon the dangers of a military-funded mapping project. Since then, we found ourselves among a growing number of community members and students across the U.S./Mexico border investigating those behind the mapping project.

Our concerns have revolved around:

1. academic ethics violations due to lack of transparency with communities about the sources of their research funding,
2. U.S. Army violations of Mexican sovereignty,
3. and violations of indigenous autonomy.

Our collective research has shown that our concerns have indeed been justified.

Bowman Expeditions & Mexico Indigena

Kansas University Dept. of Geography professors Peter Herlihy and Jerome Dobson received funding for their mapping project Bowman Expeditions from the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) at Fort Leavenworth.  The Mexican incarnation of the project —Mexico Indigena— began mapping an indigenous region known as "La Huasteca" in 2005, and then moved into areas in the state of Oaxaca amid the 2006 popular uprising of the APPO (Oaxacan People's Popular Assembly).

On the January 14th 2009, UNOSJO (the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca) released a communique expressing concerns of biopiracy as result of the Mexico Indigena mapping project, claiming that communities were unaware that the primary funder of the project was the FMSO. They cited a lack of  transparency and expressed concerns about the US Army's controversial Human Terrain Mapping System (HTMS).  Indeed, there is compelling evidence that the FMSO is engaging in what they themselves define as "Civil Information Management in Support of Counterinsurgency Operations."

Mexico Indigena's Response

Following the initial elenemigocomun.net article, the Mexico Indigena team released an official response to concerns raised by the military funding.  Since then the scandal has ballooned and several Oaxacan indigenous communities and organizers are demanding answers:  Why were they not told about the military funding?  What will the maps be used for by the military? And is any of this ethical at all?

In the face of these concerns, Professor Dobson individually, his Mexico Indigena team, and the American Geographical Society (AGS) —of which Dobson serves as president— have each released statements claiming transparency, conformance to ethical standards, as well as "the best of intentions" for the indigenous populations under study.  The AGS goes on to deny any involvement with the US Army's HTMS project.

Intentions

The Bowman Expeditions are aptly named after the father of American imperial geographic exploration and imposition, Isaiah Bowman.  A recent biography by Neil Smith, "American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization," reveals a racist, arrogant academic who used science  to advance imperial political and economic impositions around the world.  One example among many that Smith cites is that Bowman captured several indigenous Quechua people and used them as pack animals during his explorations in Peru, leading to the "discovery" of Machu Pichu. 

UNOSJO claims that neither they, nor the communities they represent were ever made aware of FMSO funding behind the Mexico Indigena mapping project.  At a press conference held in February 2009, the Director of UNOSJO Aldo Gonzalez said that originally several Oaxacan communities denied the Mexico Indigena mapping project access to their territory because they noticed a FMSO logo on some of the promotional maps shown to the communities. Later on, new maps were shown without the logo. However, at no point was the funding source ever mentioned to them.

Mexico Indigena team members have also worked in Colombia with FMSO.  In Colombia, counter insurgency and strategic military uses of US Army funded mapping projects cannot be disguised as altruistic or otherwise intended.  Either the Mexico Indigena team is lying about their intentions in Mexico, or they're feigning naivete. Yet the implications and intentions behind a military-funded project are self-evident.

Colonel Demarest: Private Property = Security

The official at FMSO assigned to the Bowman expeditions is Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey B. Demarest, an IberoAmerica researcher. During a 23-year military career, Demarest served in multiple assignments in Latin America. A graduate of the School of the Americas, his first book Geoproperty considers private property ownership as an issue of national security and strategy.

The Foreign Military Studies Office is a research and analysis center operating under the Deputy Chief of Staff G-2 (Intelligence). FMSO manages and operates the Ft. Leavenworth Joint Reserve Intelligence Center (JRIC) and conducts analytical programs focused on emerging and asymmetric threats, regional military and security developments, and other issues that define evolving operational environments around the world.  Asymmetric threats are defined as terrorist organizations and guerrilla insurgent armies, while emerging threats are being defined as social phenomenon and in particular, social movements.

Six declassified essays published by Lieutenant Colonel Demarest belie the professed innocent intentions of the Bowman Expeditions.  One is entitled "Mapping Colombia: The Correlation Between Land Data and Strategy,"  and another essay by FMSO colleague Major José M. Madera is titled "Civil Information Management in Support of Counterinsurgency Operations: A Case for the Use of Geospatial Information Systems in Colombia." It details the counterinsurgency and intelligence uses of open source GIS information and land data for what the FMSO calls "Civil Information Management."

It's notable that the bulk of the information provided by these texts is in reference to the use of geographic data for ongoing U.S. military operations in Colombia.  The military operation is financed by U.S. taxpayers through funding for Plan Colombia. Although Plan Colombia has brought about little positive results in the last ten years, recently the U.S. government voted to fund a similar plan in Mexico: the Merida Initiative, known among communities and organizers in Mexico as Plan Mexico.  Both plans use the pretext of narcoterrorism to militarize poor and indigenous communities. 

These FMSO essays and Demarest's textbook expose a particularly sinister military ethic, attitude and strategy with regards to the control of large populations of poor people, indigenous people, and the disenfranchised.  This includes the systematic devaluation of any forms of indigenous self governance and self determination.  Cultural identity, as a whole, is regarded as an impediment to prosperity.  Traditional forms of communal land usage and rights, or in Demarest's words "informal land use," is specifically cited as the primary impediment to "progress" and "security." Demarest's essays argue that informal property ownership in both rural and urban settings is a breeding ground for criminal and/or insurrectionary activity. 

Full Article:

http://www.casacollective.org/story/issue-69-march-2009/demarest-factor-ethics-us-department-defense-funding-academic-research-mex

IBM Controls the Nordic Viking Genome

In 1998, Iceland created the world's first national DNA database of its citizens. Almost all of its 275,000 citizens trace their lineages to the original Nordic Vikings of a prior millennium. In a unique arrangement, Iceland's national genetic code was sold to the genetic research and pharmacogenetic industries through an entity called deCODE Genetics. Less than 8 percent of Iceland's population opted out of the voluntary program, hence deCODE possesses virtually a complete national genetic and hereditary portrait of Iceland. Scientists at deCODE are currently utilizing the information in their study of a range of debilitating condition, including respiratory and muscular disease. Safeguards have been built into the program to conceal individuals' names. But at least one Icelander has sued the government to have her father's genetic history removed. As of March 2003, the case is still winding its way through Icelandic courts. Iceland's national genomic information will be made available to a wide variety of scientific, commercial and governmental entities in an Internet-based system that employs massive data storage drives codenamed "Shark." 31

One main company manages and controls Iceland's genetic data. That company is already positioned to become the worldwide manager and disseminator of all genomic information globally. In anticipation of that day, the company currently operates genomic offices in California, New York, Zurich, Haifa, New Delhi and Tokyo. The name of the company is IBM. Its Iceland project operates under a division known as "Life Services - Nordic." 32 

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race. By Edwin Black. Pg. 439

Related Archive:

http://ce399.typepad.com/weblog/2009/08/humans-are-extinct-part-two.html

Blame the Baby Boomers: Shallow, Greedy and Corrupt

The Baby Boom Generation will never be mistaken for the Greatest Generation that survived the Great Depression and defeated evil in a World War that killed 72 million people. I hate to tell you Boomers, but putting a yellow ribbon on the back of your $50,000 SUV is not sacrifice.

Our claim to fame is living way beyond our means for the last three decades... Baby Boomers have been occupying the White House for the last sixteen years. The majority of Congress is Baby Boomers. The CEOs and top executives of Wall Street firms are Baby Boomers. The media is dominated by Baby Boom executives and on-air stars. We have no one to blame but ourselves for the current predicament. Blaming Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson for our dire situation is a cop out. Baby Boomers had the time, power, and ability to change our course. We have chosen to leave the heavy lifting to future generations in order to live the good life today.

Of course, not all Baby Boomers are shallow, greedy, and corrupt. Mostly Boomers with power and wealth fall into this category. There were 76 million Baby Boomers born between 1946 and 1963. They now make up 28% of the U.S. population. Their impact on America is undeniable. The defining events of their generation have been the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Kent State, Woodstock, the 1^st man on the moon, and now the collapse of our Ponzi scheme financial system. They rebelled against their parents, protested the Vietnam War, and settled down in 2,300 square foot cookie cutter McMansions with perfectly manicured lawns, in mall infested suburbia. They have raised overscheduled spoiled children, moved up the corporate ladder by pushing paper rather than making things, lived above their means in order to keep up with their neighbors, bought whatever they wanted using debt, and never worried about the future. Over optimism, unrealistic assumptions, selfishness and conspicuous consumption have been their defining characteristics.

...

Early in the 1^st Reagan administration, Americans saved 12% of their income and household debt as a percentage of GDP was 63%. In 1980, the oldest Baby Boomers turned 34. They entered their prime earnings and spending years. This is when something went haywire with our great country. Deficit spending became fashionable for government, corporations and individuals. Dick “deficits don’t matter” Cheney was probably in his glory as the country ran up deficits of money, morals, and brains. The Boomers and our government chose to try and borrow and spend their way to prosperity. As we now know, Mr. Cheney’s advice about deficits not mattering was about as good as his belief that you can fire a shotgun in any direction without implications. The Boomer generation has freely made choices over the last quarter century that has brought us to the brink of a second Great Depression.

...

What the data proves is that Boomers love to shop and eat, whether they have the money or not. The top 100 retailers in the U.S. have 250,000 stores that generated $1.7 trillion of sales last year. How could America function without 31,000 McDonalds, 35,000 KFCs, Taco Bells, & Pizza Huts, 15,000 Starbucks, 7,000 Wal-Marts, 2,000 Home Depots, 4,000 K-Marts/Sears, and 8,000 Blockbusters? There are 91,000 shopping centers in the United States. The Advertising industry spends $275 billion per year to convince you to spend money you don’t have for things you don’t need. This generation lacks self control, morals, a work ethic, and savings ethic. Based on the recent actions of our government and corporate leaders, we seem to lack any ethics at all. It is immoral for the Boomer generation to run up $53 trillion in unfunded future liabilities in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to leave as our gift to future generations, while we live it up today. Optimists like to point out that Europe and Japan have much worse unfunded liability problems than the U.S. That is like taking pride in being the best looking horse at the glue factory. In the end, we’ll all still be glue.   

The 25 year Boomer borrowing and spending binge is coming to an end. The hangover will be really bad. The Federal Reserve and Treasury are trying to keep the frat party going, but everyone is passed out on the floor.

...

(excerpts)

http://seekingalpha.com/article/103202-the-shallowest-generation

Clinton, Cocaine and the Contras

Clinton's Cocaine Cover-Up?

A small dirt airstrip at Mena, Arkansas, was a major North American focus for the Contra drug and gun-running network, apparently handling a night-flight every five minutes, without lights, at the height of the activities.

Democrat Congressman for Arkansas, Bill Alexander, has stated that activities at Mena have been responsible for large volumes of drugs coming into his state. In spite of mounting evidence, however, Clinton, as Governor of the state, appears to have made no attempt to help with investigations by local prosecutors into the illegal activities there; he
may even have sat on important evidence which could have helped to bring into the open these activities, as we shall see.

In his defense Clinton has claimed that he did in fact authorise $2 5,000 for an investigation, but no trace of such a payment has yet been found. Clinton's behaviour hasled to suspicion in some quarters that he may even have been linked to the C.I.A. in the past, perhaps receiving their help in obtaining his Rhodes scholarship as has happened with others. One fellow scholar at the time, Lt.Col. Robert Earl, curiously enough went on to become an assistant to Oliver North.

Clinton is well-known too for sending his state's National Guard to Honduras for training in what amounted in effect to
Contra-supporting activities. He has honoured prominent contras, like Adolfo Calero and his brother as well as a notorious American supporter Major-General John Singlaub, with "Arkansas Traveller" awards.

Clinton had also employed, in the Arkansas Development and Finance Administration, a contra-supporter named Larry Nichols, who almost torpedoed his candidacy later by exposing his affair with Gennifer Flowers during a court case
following Nichols' dismissal from his job. Clinton's brother - who has been convicted of cocaine possession - is also involved, as a 'hanger-on' of Barry Seal who was a major organiser of the contra resupply network and
one-time pilot for the Medellin cocaine cartel.

An investigation in the newsletter "Washington Report" concluded that "There is ample evidence that Bush, Clinton, Pryor (Senator David Pryor, Democrat-Arkansas), Bumpers (Senator Dale Bumpers D-AR), Hammerschmidt, various U.S. attorneys, Arkansas state officials and Arkansas financial institutions knew plenty about the illegal activities at Mena but permitted these to  proceed.

(excerpt)

Google cached version only

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:hYbiXdw2O2IJ:www.spunk.org/texts/pubs/openeye/sp000941.txt+CIA-Drug+Running+and+Clinton&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

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Ex-Clinton Aides Advising Honduran Coup Regime (& Video)

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Hillary Clinton - Queen of Diamonds: "The Most Diabolical Red Torture"

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Nattefrost in his Bathtub, Oslo, 2005 (Hillary Clinton in Africa, American Utopias)

Ubu Roi's Belly Revisited

Ubu Roi. A play by Alfred Jarry, 1896.

...if I did not feel that their benevolence had found Ubu's belly big with more satirical symbols than we can possibly pump up tonight. The Swedenborgian philosopher Mésès has excellently compared rudimentary creations with the most perfect, and embryonic beings with the most complete, in that the former lack all irregularities, protuberances and qualities, which leaves them in more or less spherical form, like the ovum and M. Ubu, while the latter have added so many personal details that they remain equally spherical, following the axiom that the most polished object is that which presents the greatest number of sharp corners. That is why you are free to see in M. Ubu however many allusions you care to, or else a simple puppet — a schoolboy's caricature of one of his professors who personified for him all the ugliness in the world. - Alfred Jarry, opening speech.

...

"The central character is notorious for his infantile engagement with his world," wrote Jane Taylor. "Ubu inhabits a domain of greedy self-gratification." Jarry's metaphor for the modern man, he is an antihero — fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid, jejune, voracious, cruel, cowardly and evil...

Jarry satirises European philosophies and their absurd practices — in particular the propensity of the complacent bourgeois to abuse the authority engendered by success.

---

 Max Ernst, Ubu Imperator, 1923

..Père Ubu, the grotesque symbol of authority invented by Alfred Jarry, is given visual shape in playful derision. What is more, in this guise there reappears the childhood of Max Ernst, a vision of "half-slumber", as he himself described it, in which all the prestige of paternal authority and likewise of artistic creation is de-sacralised. Behind the buffoonery of power alluded to by Ubu as a spinning top, the whole traditional aesthetic of rational construction and geometric perspective is also ridiculed.

--

For Jarry, Pataphysics is the anti-scientific realm beyond metaphysics that examines the laws which preside over exceptions - an attempt to elucidate an imaginary cosmos. Jarry specifically defined Pataphysics as the “science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments”. (*4)

So we recognize here some rhizomatic roots that may have nurtured Baudrillard's hyperbolic and jaded view of an incongruous virtual-reality drenched world. In Jarry we already relish an artificial Baudrillardian simulated world created by an hallucinatory social structure where shimmering objects decree in odd ways what people can and cannot do within the vast void of virtuality. Indeed, like Jarry, Baudrillard mostly arrives at this social examination without demonstrating any sustained systematic analysis. Poof! Voila: a gaseous bon délire: an airy imaginary solution. But in Pataphysics, every occurrence in the universe is established to be an extraordinary event. No simulation possible.

Of course this aim of creating an inorganic world ex nihilo and luxuriating in its rarefied artificiality was not unique to Jarry. Indeed it was perfectly articulated in 1884 with the publication of Joris-Karl Huysmans's décadent novel A Rebours (Against Nature), a story of a recluse art worshiper who yearns for new sensations and perverse pleasures within a transcendental artificial ideal.

Book Review of Jean Baudrillard’s Pataphysics

http://post.thing.net/node/1349

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This is what Baudrillard meant by a total revolution: a strategy geared to escalate the system and push it to its breaking point. Then, giving up on every pretence of rationality, it would start revolving and achieve in the process a circularity of its own:” We know the potential of tautology when it reinforces the system’s claim to perfect sphericity (Ubu Roi’s belly)” (SE, p.4). Coming back full circle to his early pataphysical roots, Baudrillard was taunting capital to emulate Jarry’s absurdism—and share in Ubu’s grotesque fate. After all, wasn’t capitalism itself a pataphysical proposition? It was endlessly cutting the branch on which it sits, devastating the planet and endangering the human species while claiming to improve its lot. Capital didn’t care a fig for the fate of humanity. The real wasn’t its business. It had canceled the principle of reality and substituted a codification of a higher order, a hyper-reality that made the real obsolete. Its dirge-like flows were self-referential, leaving everything else in a state of self-induced simulation. The flows of capital were posthumous, post-human. In their nihilistic energy, they carried the seeds of their own destruction. Only Ubu, Jarry’s truculent hero, the coward king cannibalizing his own entourage, and himself in the process, could account for such a bullish cynicism. The society of the spectacle was turning into a soft version of the theater of cruelty, a burlesque of death with the globe as its stage. Life was being exchanged for nothing, for a handful of glittering toys, work absorbed time like a sponge and left no traces. Baudrillard wasn’t the exterminator, but the system itself. Yet no one was paying attention.

W.S. Burroughs Warned of Elitist Nazi World State using Psychic, Electronic Mind Control

And what would the future look like if such groups actually exist and if they do combine and take over? An elitist World State very much along the lines laid down by the Nazis. At the top would be a theocracy trained in psychic control techniques implemented by computerized electronic devices that would render opposition psychologically impossible. Entry to this privileged class would be permitted only to those whose dedication to the world state was absolute and unquestioning. In short, you don't get in by merit or ability but by being an all around one hundred percent shit. - The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. "Mind War" - William S. Burroughs (1985)

Mind War: Text Files

Related Archives:

From PSYOP to Mind War: Aquino and Vallely (pdf file)

Not a Ghost of a Chance

RE/Search Interview with William S. Burroughs (1982)

"Vice President Burroughs" Confirms Remote Electronic Mind Control Program

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From MindWar to FoxNews

Nattefrost in his Bathtub, Oslo, 2005 (Hillary Clinton in Africa, American Utopias)

 
Nattefrost in his Bathtub, Oslo, 2005 - Peter Beste,  http://www.stevenkasher.com/html/artistresults.asp?artist=333

I can hypnotize a man without his knowledge or consent into committing treason against the United States.- Dr. Estabrooks - Chairman of the Department of Psychology at Colgate University, 

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has helped clear rubble and plant flowers as she visited two housing schemes near Cape Town, South Africa.

They cleared rubble from the site and planted flowers and a tree.

"This is what I really believe in," she was quoted as saying during the tour. "I mean, I have travelled literally all over the world and when people organise themselves and are given the tools and the training to really empower themselves and their future and build houses and communities, that's what's lasting."

When one woman asked if Mrs Clinton wanted to make a contribution she explained she had no money on her, and turned to Africa envoy Johnnie Carson, who drew a $50 note from his wallet. "These are good businesswomen," Mrs Clinton said.

--

American Utopias

From the point of view of most Hollywood filmmaking, these utopian strategies are used to mirror the hegemonic structures found in society. Instead of imagining an alternate space as a resistance to dominant society, these films place USA as the utopian space. Such an argument follows what Jean Baudrillard provocatively argues in his book America: the US is utopia achieved and because of this, there are no poor people in USA. ”The have-nots will be condemned to oblivion, to abandonment, to disappearance pure and simple. […] And rightly so, since they show such bad taste as to deviate from general consensus.” (Baudrillard 111). Baudrillard’s argument must of course be understood as ironic, and as pointing to the ideological erasure of the poor, rather than a serious argument of no poverty in America.

...

Consider Gattaca (Andrew Niccol 1997) which portrays the struggle of Vincent who tries to become an astronaut despite being considered an in-valid, due to his faulty genes. Diagnosed with a life expectancy of no more than 30 years, Vincent goes on to prove the system wrong by living longer and becoming an astronaut in spite of the immediate rejection. However, this does not result in the film portraying the system as problematic, but simply presenting Vincent as a heroic figure. Society is not challenged, as Vincent is praised. Here, the film rejects sympathizing with the in-valids and by extension those that the in-valid symbolically represent: poor people and people of color. The film’s conclusion is the individual’s victory over the system, not the collapse or change of society. The individual succeeds in spite of the society, but this also indicates that anyone may succeed, despite the conditions they are born. Matters of race and class – folded into the image of the in-valids – are rejected as arguments for one’s situation. The geneticism Vincent faces can still be conquered, if you work hard enough: no social divide is so large that it cannot be overcome. While this may seem as a positive thing, it is also reactionary view which denies the need for change, since “the talented will overcome”.

(excerpts)

New Mappings (Denmark)

--

ce399 note:

Do you really want to spend the rest of your life on this planet being a "photo-journalist" at Auschwitz?

Hugo Chávez Indirectly Refers to Barack Obama as the Devil

...

He added that frayed ties with Washington were unlikely to improve despite the departure of Bush, the man he called the 'devil.' Now there's a new "devil" with his fingerprints all over the June 28 Honduran coup. More on that below.

At a January political rally on a historic Venezuela battlefield, Chavez said "I hope I am wrong, but I believe Obama brings the same stench, to not say another word" and do little to change his predecessor's policies.

After earlier hoping for better US - Venezuelan relations, he reacted to Obama's rhetoric, accusing him of obstructing Latin American progress and exporting terrorism. In late March on his Sunday radio/television program (Alo Presidente), he voiced the same concern in calling Obama an "ignoramus" and suggested "he should read and study a little to understand reality....the obstacle to development in Latin America has been the empire (he) preside(s) over today."

(excerpts)

Full Article:

Will Venezuelan Destabilization Follow the Honduran Coup?

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Obama (Indirectly) Refers to "Eating" Afghanistan as "Pudding" during G-20 Summit Q&A

Obamas Order from Bush Menu 

Žižek: Chocolate Laxative

Ex-Clinton Aides Advising Honduran Coup Regime (& Video)

Rwanda Revisited: Bill Clinton LIED about Knowledge of Rwanda Genocide

...

While the genocide unfolded, Boutros-Ghali was on an extended tour of Europe. To make sure Dallaire's damning cables remained hidden, he relied on his trusted deputy, Kofi Annan, who was then head of UN peacekeeping operations. If there is room for Boutros-Ghali and his French friends on Bagosora's block, there should also be room for Annan.

No international gathering these days is complete without Bill Clinton, and by some standards he too could qualify for a cell on Bagosora's block. During the 100 days of genocide in Rwanda, Clinton never even convened a meeting to discuss it because he knew that the facts were so awful that if he confronted them, he would be compelled to act. Later he said he had not known what was happening in Rwanda. General Dallaire called him a liar, and Philippe Galliard, who ran Red Cross operations in Rwanda during the genocide, agreed. "Everybody knew, every day, live, what was happening," he said after Clinton's whopper.

Just as Boutros-Ghali had an ambitious underling who was salivating for the big job, and who knew that demanding action to stop genocide in Rwanda would ruin his chances, so did Clinton. His was Madeleine Albright. As America's ambassador to the UN, she worked tirelessly to assure that the peacekeeping force was kept too small and toothless to stop the killing. Later she helped block a plan to send UN police to disarm the hundreds of thousands of Rwandan genocidaires who had fled to camps in eastern Congo – a piece of work that helped create today's Congolese hell.

Justice works slowly, and none more slowly than the international kind. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has spent more than a billion dollars since its creation in 1995, but has completed only 40 cases. All the defendants have been Rwandans, as undoubtedly will be all those convicted in the future. The tribunal's motto is "never again". A better one would from an old Bob Dylan song: The executioner's face is always well hidden.

(excerpts)

Full Article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jan/02/rwanda-genocide-theoneste-bagosora

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The Great Rwanda "Genocide Coverup"

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See Genocide in Africa on left sidebar

Virilio, Visionics and Electronic Apartheid: Automating the Interpretation of Reality (notes)

...

Nevertheless, _Polar Inertia_ is an important book for beginning to assess the revolutionary cultural impact of digital *visionics* in media studies, for affirming the crisis of representation and ambiguity surrounding the factual in the visual domain, and for anticipating the age of paradoxical logic and *telepresence* (as the possibility of the 'actual' end of modernity). In this context, one also has to wonder whether Virilio's acknowledgment of *speed* as the engine of the acceleration, breakdown, and parabolic distortion of images (and imaging) redeems an anti-ocularcentric turn in Western thought (particularly French poststructuralist thought); or does it forewarn of an active *hyperCartesianism* and extension of classical optical communication by 'electro-optical' communication. Species of anti-ocularcentric discourse resist the static taxonomies of a rigid space- time in modernist vision, whereby *knowing* was no longer an imitation of the world based on similitude, but a self-contained universal science whose function was to represent forms, magnitudes, quantities, and relations of objects in a homogenous, mechanical space. Virilio pays homage to Foucault and Merleau-Ponty in this regard for shaking up the order of things in the Western eye, disturbing the primacy of perception, and questioning the 'electronic apartheid' of the media world (although he perhaps deliberately neglects Gilles Deleuze and Luce Irigaray when they criticize Western thought for its reverence of mimetic representations, for its rejection of phantasms, its consumption of women for *specularization*, and its framed, visual reduplication of male-dominated ideas).

The reader of _Polar Inertia_, then, is led to believe that the shift toward sightless, digital vision is a movement away from the modernist perception that emphasizes the movement of visual information in a mechanical, linear, segmented time, and toward a new perceptual revolution deriving from past and present breakthroughs in quantum theory. Virilio, however, is highly critical of the effects of the 'lensless', synthetic, point to point digitalization/manipulation of appearances, and the accelerated 'photonic' transmission of those appearances. He suggests that the effects of the new 'active' optics are a deepening of some of the negative aspects of Cartesian objectivism and conventional camera cinematography, particularly regarding the emergence of paradoxical forms of duration and space-time regimes.

http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n42kafala

Paul Virilio - War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception

ce399 notes:

There exists yet another layer to the automation of the interpretation of reality through technological means that Virilio hints at though does not make explicitly clear. A previous ce399 note was made here in this regard:

News items in corporate media communications can also trigger an accompanying message in a method similar to a midi sample in computer generated music in order to 'blanket' a target geographic area with  spectral or psionic transmissions conveying Pentagon PSYOP deception and misinformation - this further strengthens the effect (a 'force multiplier') of the word-image communication broadcasts by 'traditional' media.

--

With the advent of remote brain scanning technology, a keyword read by the target individual or group in print media format, for example, can trigger silent audio (or voice-to-skull) transmissions. These transmissions can further automate anti-critical thinking programming via broadcast of  pre-recorded positive or negative corporate-military propaganda messages which, again, function as psychological operations (PSYOP)  'force multipliers'  via remote, automated and space-based action agents. 

The Psibernetic Arch: Cybernetics and ESP, Automation, Biological Cybernetics, Prefectibility of Predicitive Systems, Scientific Future Studies (notes)

Survival Research Laboratories. Los Angeles. 2005

Telematic Embrace: Visionary Ideas of Art, Technology and Consciousness. The Psibernetic Arch: Cybernetics and ESP

Automation is a universal law of development - the 22nd Congress of the [']Communist Party['] of the Soviet Union in 1961. Cybernetics = Science of Government and the perfectibility of systems. Which was the meaning the French physicist A.M. Ampere intended when he coined the word.

Cybernetic Systems/capability of correlating behaviours, trends and needs from minute to minute across the entire country. Economic prediction and scientific future studies. The research institutes of psychology and biological cybernetics/ statistics of psychic behaviour/comparative psychic research. Predictive systems. [Kahn and Weiner 1967]

Herman Kahn/Hudson Institute/[creation of] predictive systems that rely not on psychic perception or clairvoyance of an occult kind but on raw cartesian procedures of assembling hard facts and extrapolating into the long term future scenarios that have real economic and political value to the US government and corporations. [psychic predictions through technological means.]

 
SRL. San Francisco.1984. "Infernal Regions - Limited Seating"

A Historic Day for the Indigenous Movement in Bolivia: New Constitution to Grant Indigenous Autonomy

Anti-Evo Morales Poster in Santa Cruz, Bolivia

The Bolivian government has begun implementing provisions outlined in the new constitution that give indigenous people the chance to govern themselves.

President Evo Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous leader, enacted a decree setting out the conditions for Indian communities to hold votes on autonomy.

These referendums will take place in December, alongside presidential and parliamentary elections.

The new charter was bitterly opposed by Bolivia's traditional elite.

On Sunday, the provisions allowing for votes on indigenous autonomy were presented in a special event in the eastern region of Santa Cruz.

Mr Morales said it was "a historic day for the peasant and indigenous movement".

CONSTITUTION: KEY REFORMS

Re-election: Allows Mr Morales to stand for re-election in Dec 2009

Indigenous rights: Stresses importance of ethnicity in Bolivia's make-up. A whole chapter devoted to indigenous rights

Autonomy: Power decentralised, four levels of autonomy - departmental, regional, municipal and indigenous 

Resources: Sets out state control over key economic sectors, state sovereignty over vast natural gas fields 

Judiciary: Indigenous systems of justice same status as official existing system. Judges will be elected, and no longer appointed by Congress.

Land: New limit on ownership 5,000 hectares (12,355). But measure not retroactive.

"Your president, your companion, your brother Evo Morales might make mistakes but will never betray the fight started by our ancestors and the fight of the Bolivian people," he said.

Mr Morales has championed Bolivia's indigenous people, who for centuries were banished to the margins of society and did not enjoy full voting rights until 1952.

But many opposed to Mr Morales and the new constitution believe he is polarising the country by dividing it along along racial lines.

Many Bolivians of European or mixed-race descent in the fertile eastern lowlands, which hold rich gas deposits and are home to extensive farms, rejected the constitution.

The new charter came into force in February after being approved by 61% of the electorate.

It enshrines state control over key economic sectors, and grants greater autonomy not only for the nine departments but also for indigenous communities.

But the clauses regarding layers of autonomy could lead to a raft of competing claims, correspondents say.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8180790.stm

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75th Anniversary of the 1934 San Francisco General Strike

Sunday is the 75th anniversary of a day blood ran in the streets of San Francisco - a day of wild rioting on the waterfront that left two men dead on a sidewalk, shot down by police.

Thursday, July 5, 1934 - a day striking labor unions called "Bloody Thursday" - was a turning point in the history of working people on the West Coast.

Though the thought of strikes, riots, tear gas and armed troops on the San Francisco waterfront seems like something out of the dim, dead past, the 1934 strike had an impact that is still felt to this day.

"I think it is still relevant to the Bay Area," said Kevin Starr, the pre-eminent historian of California who wrote about the strike in "Endangered Dreams," a history of California in the Great Depression.

For one thing, the strike led to the creation of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, a major player in the economics of shipping. While San Francisco's port has faded away, ILWU union workers staff all the West Coast ports, including Los Angeles and Long Beach, the busiest ports in the country. A longshoreman who works 2,000 hours a year now can earn $130,000, the union says. They are the aristocrats of labor.

A waterfront strike now would paralyze America's foreign trade.

Today, the world of 1934 seems like another age. "It was a different time," Starr said, "and a very different city." San Francisco was the most important port on the West Coast, and the Embarcadero was full of ships from all over the world, and in many ways it was the economic heart of the Bay Area.
The showdown

The bloody events of that July day - two dead, 109 injured - set off a general strike that rocked San Francisco to its foundations.

National Guard troops, armed to the teeth, patrolled the waterfront and, for awhile, it seemed San Francisco teetered on the edge of revolution.

Mayor Angelo J. Rossi apparently thought so. "I pledge to you that I, as chief executive of San Francisco, to the full extent of my authority, will run out of San Francisco every Communist agitator," he said.

It was clear that he meant Harry Bridges, leader of the striking longshoremen. Never before in the history of San Francisco had the forces of the far left, Bridges and his associates, and the far right, the mayor and the conservative businessmen who backed him, faced off in a showdown like this.

Starr thinks the bitter and violent clashes of those July days 75 years ago pointed out the dangers of what he calls "ideological lines in the sand."

One result was that San Francisco became a union town, where no politician dared to cross a picket line and where unions, even now, still have considerable clout.

The 1934 strike taught the unions that if they pulled together, they could shut down a whole city and they could force management to deal with them.

"It was a pivotal event in San Francisco labor history," said Catherine Powell, director of the Labor Archives Project at San Francisco State University.

The showdown had been simmering for years. An earlier waterfront strike had been crushed in 1919, and the employers formed the Industrial Association of San Francisco, in effect a union of employers to fight a union of workers.

They also had a hand in a company-organized union called the Longshoreman's Association, also called the "Blue Book" union. Longshore gangs were hired by a process known as the "Shape up," where managers, called "walking bosses," picked out who would get jobs.

It was a rotten system; crooked, too. It was easy to bribe a boss; the work was dangerous, and the pay was low.

In May, the longshoremen went out on strike. It was the depth of the Depression; workers had nothing to lose, and soon the strike spread. Pretty soon, the piers and the anchorages in the bay were full of idle ships.

The battle

The employers were determined to break the strike; they brought in strikebreakers, and on July 5, with the help of City Hall and the police, they decided to open the port.

The employers, backed by an army of cops, tried to move cargo by trucks and freight trains. The strikers and their supporters tried to stop them. The cops used clubs and vomiting gas; the strikers threw rocks and bricks.

"Don't think of this as a riot," The Chronicle said, "it was a hundred riots." At one point the strikers were forced back, up Rincon Hill, and fought a skirmish they called "The Battle of Rincon Hill." The site is now occupied by the One Rincon Tower.

In the afternoon, police fired on strikers at the corner of Steuart and Mission streets. Howard Sperry, a striking sailor, and Nick Bordoise, an unemployed fry cook, were shot and killed.

The news shocked the city and nearly brought it to its knees.

Four days after the killings, the bodies of the two men were given a public funeral. "In life they wouldn't have commanded a second glance on the streets of San Francisco, but in death they were borne the length of Market Street in a stupendous and reverent procession that astounded the city," R.S. Clampett wrote in The Chronicle.

Thousands of men followed the coffins up Market to Valencia Street, marching silently, the only sound "the dull roll of muffled drums and the steady dirge of the funeral march" from a union band.

The two were "transformed by death into heroic symbols of labor," the paper said.

The general strike followed, and then, eventually, a settlement. The unions got most of what they wanted. Within five years, San Francisco had turned into a union town; "a place," said historian Chris Carlsson, "where even the coffee shops were organized. The coffee was made by a union cook and served by a union waitress."

For years, the government tried to prove Bridges was a Communist and to have him deported. He was tried four times, finally cleared in 1953.

Back then, as Starr points out, San Francisco was a manufacturing town: Coffee was roasted here, fruit and vegetables were packed in San Francisco, ships were built in the city, San Francisco made steel, door locks, mattresses and metal cans.

It all gradually faded. San Francisco, some said, had turned into a mini Manhattan, but the memory of 1934 stayed alive, with memorials every year.

The legacy

The corner where the two men where shot is now the site of a tourist hotel; the union headquarters is an upscale restaurant. A developer wanted to set up a hamburger place on a waterfront pier and name it for Harry Bridges; instead it was turned into an expensive restaurant serving Peruvian tapas.

Bridges died in 1990 at age 88; he'd served as port commissioner, an honored citizen. "He was a great guy, lean, mean and salty, with a bit of a swagger," Herb Caen wrote of him. "For years he cast a long shadow over the San Francisco waterfront, for better or worse, but definitely for history."

Bridges lived in a different San Francisco.

"One of the centers of world wealth," Starr calls it. "Workers can't afford to live in San Francisco," said Steve Zeltzer, one of the organizers of a festival to commemorate the strike this weekend.

Is San Francisco still a union town? "No," Carlsson said. "The unions are ghosts of what they once were. The union movement has lost the vision."

He says it is still important to remember 1934. "It was an incredible moment in history," Carlsson says. "You can see what was possible." If times get tougher, he says, "It is going to happen again."

Events honor strike

A number of events commemorating the 1934 San Francisco waterfront strike will be held Sunday and all week.

There will be a commemoration of the deaths of two men at the hands of the police starting at 9 a.m. Sunday at Steuart and Market streets, near the Ferry Building. Speeches and a commemorative march along the northern Embarcadero to North Point Street.

There will also be a bicycle tour of important sites in the history of the San Francisco labor movement beginning at noon Sunday at 1390 Mission St., at Ninth Street. Minimum contribution $15.

"From Wharf Rats to Lords of the Docks," a film by Ian Ruskin on labor leader Harry Bridges, will be shown at 7 p.m. Sunday on KQED, Channel 9.

For other events visit www.laborfest.net or call (415) 642-8066.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/04/MNNL18HJ1S.DTL