The DISH

Unbossed and unbought news and information you can use

Vol. 11 Issue 33…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race…August 17, 2008

Intuit's Vibe

June

By Shi Tao

My whole life

Will never get past "June"

June, when my heart died

When my poetry died

When my lover

Died in romance's pool of blood

June, the scorching sun burns open my skin

Revealing the true nature of my wound

June, the fish swims out of the blood-red sea

Toward another place to hibernate

June, the earth shifts, the rivers fall silent

Piled up letters unable to be delivered to the dead

About Me: 'June' is a lament that recalls the brutal crackdown by the Chinese government in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Shi Tao, a pro-democracy activist, is serving a 10-year sentence on charges of illegally giving 'state secrets' to a foreign entity.

Bit of History

Tlatelolco: A Dirty Little War (1968)

"There was one Mexico before 1968 and one Mexico afterward. Tlatelolco was the dividing line." -- Luis Gonzalez de Alba

Many have been critical of the Chinese authorities for razing neighborhoods, displacing residents and cracking down on dissidents ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Dave Zirin, sports commentator, noted that Los Angeles, Seoul, Atlanta and Athens were marked by displacement of hundreds and even thousands of residents, as well as anti-crime roundups and the removal of "undesirables" from Olympic core areas. According to the Geneva-based Center on Housing Rights and Evictions, the Seoul Games caused the forced removal of some 720,000 residents to make way for Olympic facilities, which was the record until the estimated 1.25 million displaced by the Beijing Games.

However, Zirin writes in the Human Rights Watch anthology China's Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges, "The worst example of Olympic repression came in 1968 in Mexico City, where hundreds of Mexican students and workers occupying the National University were slaughtered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco. The story of the Tlatelolco massacre is shrouded in secrecy, second only to the US cover-up leading to the War in Iraq.

Retrospectively, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the International Olympic Committee "helped countries use [the Olympics] as a coming-out party." Tokyo was the first to host the Games in Asia (1964), and it was meant "to show that 'They weren't the old Japan." But Mexico was no Japan, and was about to lose the Olympics in 1967. Waiting in the wings were Detroit, Buenos Aires, and Lyon, France, cities that were beaten out in 1963 by Mexico City. A New York Times headline in 1965 read "Detroit ready if needed."

Mexico in 1968 was a nation of secrets and lies, where rumors trumped facts, propaganda masqueraded as news, and government officials were accountable to no one. Scrambling to hang on to the Games after appointing Gustavo Díaz Ordaz President of the Olympic Committee, Mexico's President Adolfo López Mateos suffered a cerebral aneurysm; preparations for the Games fell far behind schedule. Díaz Ordaz applied a court press to keep the Mexico City Games.

1968 was a year of global unrest and violence and in Mexico tensions surrounding the Student Movement reached the boiling point, as the Opening Ceremonies drew closer. Fights between students and police reflected wide discontent with the country's autocratic Institutional Revolutionary Party's (PRI) government, as students demanded more freedom with protest. The three-month-old student movement attempted a serious challenge to the authoritarian rule of the PRI. The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) Ciudad Universitaria campus was the center of the student movement and protest marches began to flood the streets in July. For the next two months, student demonstrations filled Reforma, the Zócalo, and the Plaza de las tres culturas at Tlatelolco.

Violent clashes between students and the police began on July 22. The army surrounded the campus of the National Polytechnic Institute to contain student protest. On August 1, a march led by UNAM's president was blocked by tanks and turned back to the university. This act showed Pres. López Mateos' determination to prevent the Games from being molested by social protest. On October 2, 1968, he unleashed the combined power of the Mexican military and police forces on unarmed student demonstrators and other civilians in a war against dissenters. The army shot and bayoneted thousands of students, workers, innocent women and children in the square and the surrounding apartments of Tlatelolco. The government covered up the scale of the slaughter and attendant torture and disappearances that followed this attack.

Although months of nationwide student strikes had prompted an increasingly hard-line response, no one was prepared for the bloodbath that Tlatelolco became. More shocking still was the cover-up that kicked in as soon as the smoke cleared. Eyewitnesses to the killings said the President's "security" forces entered the plaza bristling with weapons and backed up by armored vehicles. The attacker "wore a single white glove to identify members of the 'Olympia Battalion' - a secret army unit of thugs that waded into students beating, arresting and shooting. Students, passers-by, and residents of the Tlatelolco apartment complex told of hundreds of bodies: lying in pools of blood, stacked up against the walls of the church, or tossed into trucks when the cleanup crew arrived, after the shooting stopped.

"Calculations of those killed have oscillated between 200 and 1,500." The Tlatelolco Massacre' began what became known as the "Dirty Little War" in Mexico. It refers to the thousands that were killed or simply disappeared at the hands of the PRI, never to be seen again during the late 1960s and 70s. The cover-up was so complete that until this day the truth of what really happened and the number and names of those killed is still unknown. What is known for sure is that the Mexican government traded the blood of it people for the so-called prestige of hosting the Olympic Games. This merciless dirty little war, much like the US' blood for oil policy in Iraq, cost young, poor and powerless Mexicans of the "Tlatelolco massacre" their lives for the ideals of Olympic gold. (Sources: http://blogs.mysanantonio.com and www.gwu.edu)

Venue for an Artist

'68 (Excerpts)

By Paco Ignacio Taibo II

When all was said and done, it had been nothing but a student movement lasting one hundred and twenty-three days. No more and no less. And yet it had given us - given a whole generation of students - a past and a country, ground beneath our feet.... The most unhinged joined an urban guerilla struggle that over the next five years bled out into a merciless dirty war. A very large group of us went into the neighborhoods and founded community organizations ... others went into factories .... others ended up in the countryside - an even stranger land. Of course there were defeats, a shitload of them, but surrender was rare. Sixty-eight bequeathed us the reserves of defiance and determination that had been the motor of the Movement as a whole, and it infused us with a sense of place, a firmly rooted feeling of nationality.

But then there are days when I see myself, and I don't recognize myself. Bad times, when the night prolongs a rainy day, when sleep won't come, and I wrestle vainly with the computer keyboard. I realize then that we seem doomed to be ghosts of '68. Well, what's so bad about that? I ask myself: better to be Draculas of resistance than PRI-ist monsters of Frankenstein. And then the keys produce graceless sparks, weak flares, memories that are sometimes painful but most of the time raise a slight smile; and I long for that old spirit of laughter; I mourn, growing fearful of the dark, for an intensity now lost, for that feeling of immortality, for that other me of that never-ending year.

The persistence of the intellectual community and a number of newspapers and magazines have repeatedly turned the spotlight back onto the '68 Movement.... Photographs and films have been dug out of the archives, an excellent documentary has been made by Carlos Mendoza ... and a book published, Parte de Guerra II [Mexico City: Aguilar, 2002], with a commentary by Carlos Monsiváis and Julio Scherer García, that sheds much light on the role of the army.

When, after 71 years of unbroken PRI rule, the Vicente Fox administration government came to power with a much-touted commitment to 'transparency', a Special Public Prosecutor was appointed to investigate the political crimes of the 1960s and 70s. Although it is now officially admitted that the state was responsible for many hundreds of killings in those years, as yet only one indictment has been sought, that of former president Luis Echeverría (Díaz Ordaz's Minister of the Interior in October 1968), charged with "genocide" in the killing of "dozens" of student demonstrators on 10 June 1971. This incident, known as the Corpus Christi Massacre, involves a bizarre plot supposedly hatched by the then president himself and executed by a goon squad known as 'Los Halcones' (The Falcons), the aim being to intimidate veteran student leaders of 1968 just then being released from prison. After two days the request to indict Echeverría was denied on the basis of a thirty-year statute of limitations; the government has appealed.

So today things remain much as they were in late 2003: as long as the murderers are not brought to justice, the wounds will fester. The special prosecutor's office has moved only under external pressure, lurching this way and that, opening investigations and calling on ex-presidents to testify, which they refuse to do. As for us, obdurate as ever, thirty-five years down the line, we are back in the street again. [21 August 2004] (Source: http://info.interactivist.net/node/3482)

About Me: Escaping the fascist dictatorship of General Franco in Spain, Taibo's family arrived in Mexico when he was a young child. An intellectual, historian, professor, journalist, social activist, union organizer and world renowned writer, he is considered the founder of the neo-political genre in Latin America and is President of the International Association of Political Writers. One of the most prolific writers in Mexico with over 500 editions of 51 books, his work has been published in 29 countries and translated into over a dozen languages. "68" is a look back from twenty years' of hindsight. First published in 1991, '68' is a brief memoir of the student movement based on notes made in the immediate aftermath of the disaster at Tlatelolco. It is an anecdotal time capsule, quirky, intimate, and poignant. '68 is available from Seven Stories Press, New York 2004, in the original Spanish or English translation.

Politics Y2K8

Chinese Government Apes Bush's "Free Speech Zone" Policy

By Steve Watson

In a scenario resembling that of the pot calling the kettle black, President Bush has hit out at the Chinese government for its crackdown on dissent during the Olympics, while the Communist regime is aping a "free speech zone" policy created by Bush's own administration.

In a speech from Seoul yesterday Bush stated: "The United States believes the people of China deserve the fundamental liberty that is the natural right of all human beings. America stands in firm opposition to China's detention of political dissidents, human rights advocates and religious activists. We speak out for a free press, freedom of assembly, and labour rights not to antagonize China's leaders, but because trusting its people with greater freedom is the only way for China to develop its full potential."

Bush made the remarks hours before he left for Beijing to attend tonight's Games opening ceremony. Critics have suggested that his presence as the first US president to attend an Olympics abroad, is providing legitimacy to the ruling Communist Party's crackdown on freedom-of-speech advocates.

The ultimate irony of course is that the Chinese Government, in designating three secluded parks in Beijing as official Olympic demonstration zones, is aping a policy created by the Bush administration which introduced and expanded the concept of "first amendment areas".

These Orwellian "free speech zones" were most notably used in 2004 during the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. The areas close to the DNC in Boston consisted of concrete walls, barriers and metal cages with barbed wire.

The areas were invisible to the Fleet Center where the convention was held and were referred to as "Boston's Camp X-Ray". At the time protesters converted the zone into a mock prison camp by donning hoods and marching in the cage with their hands behind their backs.

At the 2004 RNC in New York the zones were also employed as protestors and innocent people were swept up in mass arrests and transferred to then-recently closed Hudson Pier Depot at Pier 57 on the Hudson River in Manhattan. The facility was quickly dubbed "Guantanamo on the Hudson" as thousands were bound and paraded into a large warehouse area behind steel caging. More recently the power to declare "free speech zones" has been declared by the Secret Service, who scout locations where the U.S. president is scheduled to speak, or pass through, target those who carry anti-Bush signs and escort them to the free speech zones prior to and during the event. Inevitably the zones are far away from the event location and well away from any media spotlight.

The protest pens will once again be used at both national party conventions later this year with local law enforcement working with the secret service to designate the areas in Minneapolis for the RNC and in Denver for the DNC.

So when you hear President Bush vehemently criticizing the Chinese for restricting protest, and being praised by the corporate media for doing so, it is understandable that the natural reaction is an immediate need to vomit profusely.

Disgruntled says: The US' decision to invade Iraq based on faulty evidence has had long term repercussions on the nation's standing in the international community. By breaking international law to invade and occupy Iraq, it lost goodwill and is no longer seen as a credible source of moral authority. In supporting Israel, it continues to lose the ability to influence conditions where people are being oppressed, since it supports one of the world's most egregious oppressors. On Friday, George W. Bush, principal culprit in the US' global political and economic decline, held a press briefing in the White House Rose Garden to issue a statement on the situation in the Republic of Georgia. Bush basically reiterated US support for that country and called on Russia to respect the new democracy's territorial sovereignty. That said, his closing remarks were particularly ironic. Especially his statement, "Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century." Given his militaristic actions, which all took place this century, it took colossal hubris to call Russia a bully when the US is occupying two countries and has troops stationed all over the world ostensibly to protect its vital interests. There is no greater bully than the world's sole superpower under George W. Bush.

Disgruntled wants to know: Over the past year, there has been a lot of press concerning the use of human growth hormones by professional athletes to improve their performance. The US media coverage of doping, as it is called, has been particularly harsh on those athletes that have won Olympic medals or received large incomes. You know the ones; Marion Jones, who had to return her Olympic medals, and Barry Bonds, who broke Hank Aaron's baseball batting record, and so on. A white tennis player/doper was suspended either earlier this year or late 2007, but his name is not a household word, because there was no media feeding frenzy. That particular obsession has been reserved for American black athletes, at least in the US press. Since there is this media concern about athletic enhanced performance with the use of drugs, one wonders why there has been no scrutiny of Justine Henin, whose body obviously changed as she rose to world's number one status before precipitously retiring in May of this year?

Disgruntled feels: Unscrupulous! The price of oil has fallen below $120 a barrel. Now, don't get me wrong, I am not complaining, since prices at the pump have fallen somewhat. However, when oil was on a precipitous ride up, gasoline prices rose in synch; it was as though the stuff came out of the ground and instantly found its way into the pumps, as though there was no intermediary process in bringing the product to the market. More important, the existing stock of oil and gas, which came to market before the price rose, experienced an increase as well. This is not supposed to happen, unless consumers are being gouged. It that is the case, and I believe it is, the government should be acting to protect consumers from this unscrupulous business practice and punishing the perpetrators. Instead, the best Congress big oil can buy is on a permanent vacation, allowing big oil to make exorbitant profits on the backs of US consumers, even willing to engage in more killing and offshore drilling so these unscrupulous entities can make more money.

Mailbox: E-Mails, Faxes and Phone Calls

Email www.ap.com US has political, economic stake in far-flung spat...By Anne Gearan... There's more than meets the eye to the frantic U.S. efforts Friday to talk Russia and U.S. ally Georgia out of war over an obscure mountain tract most Americans have never heard of. A look at the map and your gas credit card bill shows why. South Ossetia is claimed by Georgia, the former Soviet republic that cast its lot with the US and the West to the eternal irritation of Moscow. The breakaway province has been under Russia's sway for years. Georgia sits in a tough neighborhood, shoulder to shoulder with huge Russia, not far from Iran, and astride one of the most important crossroads for the emerging wealth of the rich Caspian Sea region. A U.S.-backed oil pipeline runs through Georgia, allowing the West to reduce its reliance on Middle Eastern oil while bypassing Russia and Iran.

Email www.huffingtonpost.com China Unveils Frightening Futuristic Police State at Olympics...By Naomi Klein...The Olympics have opened up a backdoor for the regime to massively upgrade its systems of population control and repression. So far, the Olympics have been an open invitation to China-bash, a bottomless excuse for Western journalists to go after the Commies on everything from Internet censorship to Darfur. Through all the nasty news stories, however, the Chinese government has seemed amazingly unperturbed. That's because it is betting on this: when the opening ceremonies begin, you will instantly forget all that unpleasantness as your brain is zapped by the extravaganza that is the Beijing Olympics. Like it or not, you are about to be awed by China's sheer awesomeness. The games have been billed as China's "coming out party" to the world. They are far more significant than that. These Olympics are the coming out party for a disturbingly efficient way of organizing society, one that China has perfected over the past three decades, and is finally ready to show off. It is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarianism communism -- central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance -- harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism. Some call it "authoritarian capitalism," others "market Stalinism," personally I prefer "McCommunism."

Email www.ap.com White Supremacists Hope Obama Win Prompts Backlash?...By Emily Wagster Pettus...They're not exactly rooting for Barack Obama, but prominent white supremacists anticipate a boost to their cause if he becomes the first black president. His election, they say, would trigger a backlash -- whites rising up, a revolution of sorts -- that they think is long overdue. He'd be a "visual aid," says former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, in trying to bring others around to their view that whites have lost control of America. Obama's election, says another, would jar whites into action, writing letters, handing out pamphlets rather than sitting around complaining. While most Americans have little or no direct contact with white supremacists, organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center keep close tabs; the law center estimates some 200,000 people nationwide are active in such groups.

Email stacyechase@comcast.net Prior to adjoining for its summer recess, the US Congress has approved a 170 million dollar increase in security assistance to Israel as part of its new 10-year, 30 billion dollar defense aid commitment to the Jewish state. The money for Israel was part of a larger supplemental spending bill that included 162 billion dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. America's pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, welcomed the congressional action, saying it would increase US aid to Israel to 2.55 billion dollars in fiscal year 2009, up from 2.38 billion dollars this year. "The US commitment to maintaining Israel's qualitative military edge is the cornerstone of American policy in the region," AIPAC said in a statement following the congressional action.

Email http://tinyurl.com/5ms9y5...In 2003, just before he got fired for saying it, the Republican Secretary of the US Treasury noted national debt under Bush was at least $44.2 trillion. Remember March 2003? That's when our attention was diverted by a" convenient," not required war on Iraq.....it was produced by economists and budget analysts at the U.S. Treasury. The study was ordered in 2002 by then Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil and was slated to appear in the President's budget, released in February 2003. O'Neil instructed his team, led by Jagadeesh Gokhale, then Federal Reserve Senior Economic Advisor and now Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, and Kent Smetters, then Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Treasury, and now Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, to calculate the country's fiscal gap. When O'Neil was fired, the study was censored"