x ray of a news story - the mexican election

The Mexican election is proving to be an x ray of the news business.

The so called “preliminary result” showed that PAN’s candidate, and the candidate of emerging market investors, Felipe Calderon, had pulled ahead by 400,000 some votes. The number remaining to count was 800.000 votes. Hence, it looked like Calderon had an insurmountable lead.

This, at least, is what the NYT reported. And it was reported internationally. Here, for example, is the Globe and Mail (a Canadian paper for which LI has written), today:

“The party of leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador challenged preliminary results of Sunday's presidential election, accusing Mexican election authorities of failing to count more than three million votes.
Mr. Lopez Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor, has claimed victory in the divisive election even though he trailed his conservative rival, Felipe Calderon of the National Action Party, by slightly more than 400,000 votes, or one percentage point, after the Federal Election Institute (IFE) completed a preliminary count on Monday.
The official count is due to start today, but an announcement of the result is not expected until Sunday.

"Preliminary figures showed Mr. Calderon with 36.4 per cent of the vote, Mr. Lopez Obrador with 35.3 per cent and Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI) with 21.6 per cent.”

This is the Financial Times story, today:

“Manuel Camacho, a congressman for Mr Lopez Obrador's Democratic Revolution party (PRD) and a key strategist in the leftwing candidate's campaign, told the FT yesterday: "We are almost certainly going to contest this election . . . but we are not going to generate a dispute unless we are sure of our arguments."

"His remarks were made as Felipe Calderon, the centre-right candidate for the ruling National Action party (PAN), appeared to have taken a small but decisive lead in what is turning out to have been the closest election in Mexico's history.
A preliminary count by the country's Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) showed Mr Calderon with an advantage of 400,000 votes - about 1 per cent of the total cast - over Mr Lopez Obrador.”

These stories repeat the AP and NYT accounts from July 3. The problem is, of course, that they are false. The notion that, for instance, there is a preliminary count is a newspaper event – as we learned in today’s stories in WAPO, the NYT, and the LATimes.

From today’s LATimes“Ugalde [the head of the commission counting the votes] reminded Mexicans in a television interview Tuesday that the preliminary count issued by the institute had no legal standing. The official winner will be determined after a recount of the polling reports begins today. It remains unclear when that count will be complete.

"We still do not have a winner," Ugalde said, adding that there was never any intent to hide the vote result from the public.”

And further:

“An initial count of the ballots gave a slim but apparently insurmountable lead to Calderon. On Monday evening, Calderon was leading Lopez Obrador by 402,708 votes, with 98.45% of polling stations "processed," according to official reports.

But election authorities acknowledged Tuesday that the preliminary count did not include vote totals from more than 11,000 stations where "irregularities" were noted in official paperwork. Those stations were listed as "processed" in the official reports, but their votes were not included in the tally.

Late Tuesday, election officials added the 2.5 million votes to the public count. Lopez Obrador outpolled Calderon on these ballots by more than 145,000 votes, narrowing Calderon's lead to slightly more than 257,000 ballots, or 0.6 percentage point.”

Now, when LI first scribbled this down, we were sure that something odd was going on with the very notion of preliminary results. Apparently, the oddity stems from an agreement between the parties and the election commission. This is from a site entitled Mexdata:

"As a matter of fact, Mexico’s electoral law does not include the PREP mechanism, nor is the chairman of the board of the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) given the option to release the preliminary results publicly on the same day as the election. The decision to allow this was the result of an agreement reached with the political parties, which said four hours after the polls close each could have their data transmitted to the IFE, so that it could then release trusted preliminary result data on election night.

The PREP results do not take into consideration any challenges made by poll representatives, nor the possibility of ballots from some of those polls being annulled. However, besides the dependable information each political party knows this, through their polling place representatives, as they too have the information that supposedly corresponds with that of the IFE. Thus the PREP results are trustworthy, although not definitive."

So it is going to far to say that the newspapers were wholly inventing the preliminary results -- rather, they were giving them a false finality. The word to watch for – the word that went around the world – is “insurmountable.” As LI noted a couple of days ago, the news – especially when these kinds of coups occur – operates in a special temporal mode. Just like in your favorite fascoid action movie, the hero moves in slo-mo. This isn’t just one way of showing an event –it is an essential constituent of the event. What is otherwise unbelievable happens right before your baby blues. How can you doubt your vision? How can you doubt that ‘insurmountable’ lead – which seems, indeed, to have been cut in half, now, with 900,000 votes still waiting to be counted?

In this way, the Obrador’s complaint can be made to seem like sour grapes. Which is how the headlines, then, will cast the issue – for after the hero, some stunning Aryan, has taken care of the villain, the film jumps back to normal speed. Is the villain going to start complaining? Why, this is the way films are made. You can't turn against the very condition of your representation. That condition is inevitable. To complain about it shows a lack of the sportif! So many poor people do that. They sit around and bitch. Life’s unfair. Like, get a job is the only answer to that one.

As for the news role in making sure that there are no surprises in these elections, the end of the LATimes piece has a nice and telling detail:

“Suspicion among Lopez Obrador's supporters was heightened Monday when the investigative magazine Proceso, citing police intelligence sources, reported that senior Interior Ministry officials had attempted to shape media coverage on election night.

"Ministry officials called the news directors at Mexico's two leading television networks and requested that they not broadcast the results of their exit polls, Proceso reported.

"Interior Minister Carlos Abascal did not deny making such calls, though he said Mexico's media were free of the government controls of the recent past. The networks did not report the specific figures from their exit poll results out of a sense of responsibility, he said.

"Abascal made several oblique references to Lopez Obrador, without naming him, and insisted on the need for all parties to respect the official count. He noted that during the campaign, all parties signed an accord pledging to honor the results.

"We insist that the electoral process has to be absolutely respected, because it was transparent," Abascal said. "It is characteristic of democracy to have argument and passionate rivalry, but it is also characteristic of democracy to submit unconditionally to the referee and the result."”

The sham, here, is paper thin. As PAN already showed when they tried to impeach Obrador, the party still has not got down the PRI talent for suppressing the opposition.

LI, of course, hopes that Obrador’s share of the 900.000 still to count might just overcome the insurmountable lead of … what is it now? 257,000 votes. But the iconic 400,000 that gave Calderon his ‘insurmountable’ lead is what will stick with the media. The outlines of the story are in place, just as they were in Florida. It isn’t enough just to steal elections with the ridiculous array of problems that we saw in Ohio in 2004, say – the press – which often chuckles and tut tuts itself about being so concerned with the horse race, the scoop - is critical in shaping the story.

The horse race is fixed. The mounts are doped. And we will definitely not be listening to complaints by the 2 dollar bettors, who obviously don’t know what the meaning of ‘insurmountable’ is.

ps -- for the other side of these numbers, making the case that the votes are already counted from the 11,000 supposedly tossed out precincts, LI readers can check out Markinmexico Blog. We looked around to find some conservative commentary on Mexico, but it is all so depressingly the same hamburger. But Mark, who is pro-PAN, is actually (mirabile dictu!) an intellectually respectable source of information.

pps -- it looks like Mexico might get something that the U.S. was denied in 2000 - an open election. The turnabout for Obrador is astonishing the Mexican electorate, who are seeing a thing never seen in Mexico -- the way the election results are made. Mexico has been haunted, since 1988, by stolen elections, and by the never explained events at the end of the Salinas era. This election is going to cripple, we think, Foxismo -- that most dubious of macro-economic strategies -- even if Calderon turns out, in the end, to be the winner. Calderon is a remarkable blank in his own election -- Obrador, as either a hate figure or an adored figure, is the only politician, at the moment, who counts. Calderon's proclamation that he slept late this morning (who, me worry?) was pathetic in every way. The PAN has not had time to absorb the whole disgusting infrastrucutre of the Salinas era PRI yet - though, of course, they are financed by the same people.

Obrador, it seems to me, did the right thing in the final weeks of the campaign by bringing in, of all people, FDR to drive out the voodoo doll of Chavez that the PAN was trying to hang around his neck. In fact, Mexico does need a heavily Keynesian policy -- it cannot continue the cheap labor policy to find its niche in the world economy. That made some sense twenty years ago, but only if combined with policies that would, in effect, accumulate capital -- both private and public. This never happened. Mexico can't compete with China on the road to the bottom, and it is gong to have massive problems in those industrial areas, like Juarez, in which the working wage, if you aren't lucky enough to find a job with a drug mafia, has remained unchanged for twenty years. And along with the wage stagnation comes the stagnation in the state of manufacturing: what they are doing in Juarez is what they were doing 20 years ago. That is the failure of Salinas style neo-liberalism, a sort of wax museum of the old blue book days in the U.K., circa 1850. It is a dead end, and whether the symbolic corpse at the end of it is the 1 day wonder of Calderon, or whether the symbolic corpses are more plentiful, and composed of the butchered women of Juarez -- the fact is, that road doesn't go anywhere anymore.

happy 4th!

Happy fourth, sons and daughters of liberty!

Resolutions are made on New Year's day, so why not on the 4th? Patriotic resolutions. LI's are:
a. to keep shooting peas at the imperial nightmare we now struggle under;
b. to choke the army, overthrow illegal executive power, and end the occupation of Iraq;
c. to advance the cause of transforming the treadmill of production into an earth friendly system, so help me God;
d. to thread the narrow passages, make the crossings over the howling deserts, and water the horses of the grand old American language, my lovely tongue.

And here's some Blake from America: a prophecy:

The bones of death, the cov'ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry'd.
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst;


Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field:
Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;
Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open.
And let his wife and children return from the opressors scourge;
They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream.
Singing. The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning
And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night;
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.

Cobblestone, the magazine of pre-teen warmongering

Here’s a story that made LI’s blood pressure shoot up.


“Parents and teachers are complaining that the latest issue of a popular magazine for preteens amounts to little more than an early recruitment pitch for the Army.
Cobblestone magazine, which is put out by Carus Publishing in Peterborough, is aimed at children ages 9-14 and is distributed nationwide to schools and libraries. Its latest issue features a cover photo of a soldier in Iraq clutching a machine gun and articles on what it's like to go through boot camp, a rundown of the Army's ''awesome arsenal'' and a detailed description of Army career opportunities.”

Stories like this show pretty much what the struggle in this country is all about. On one side is a war culture proposing to grind our children into Gainsbugers. On the other side is pure goodness. Hey, it is an easy choice!

“Most controversial has been a set of classroom guides that accompany the magazine, which suggest teachers invite a soldier, Army recruiter or veteran to speak to their classes and ask students whether they might want to join the Army someday.

One of the teaching guides -- written by Mary Lawson, a teacher in Saint Cloud., Fla. -- suggests having students write essays pretending they are going to join the Army: ''Have them decide which career they feel they would qualify for and write a paper to persuade a recruiter why that should be the career.''”

Here’s a counter suggestion from LI. Invite a peace activist to the classroom. Ask students how they might react to attacks on the Constitution by their own government. Explain concepts like “mercenary,” “tyranny,” "aggressive war." Have students write essays about how they would react to having their country occupied for three or four years. Show pictures of the dead and wounded of Fallujah, Ramadi, Baghdad, Samara and other Iraqi cities. Take students on a field trip to the local recruiting station. Supply them with picket signs saying, Hell no, we won’t go. Explain hell and devils (Hint: Use photograph of Vice President as an illustration).

Seriously, there are anti-recruitment groups who are doing high school visits. This is a link to a directory of ‘opt out’ organizations (one of which is located in LI’s town – Austin, Texas).

the curious case of the terrorist who barked in the night

One of the truly astonishing things about the past five years, all things considered, is the de-emphasis on crimes that make the Bush administration feel threatened. So, once it was apparent that the FBI was too disorganized to solve the anthrax case, the case disappeared from the news, generating less stories in all, than, say, the prosecution of Michael Jackson. And once it became apparent that the Bush administration strategy in Afghanistan was not aimed at destroying Al Qaeda, but preserving a remnant of it (terrorism-on-tap, a cynical and criminal tactic), the press fell into line, invariably describing Osama bin Laden as ‘on the run,’ and pretending that his whereabouts are a deep dark mystery. It is less deep and dark a mystery than what VP Cheney was doing at that ranch in Texas last autumn. And Osama bin Laden seems far less on the run than your average Hollywood starlet, always having to jet off to some new location. Al Qaeda’s structures are alive and vigorous in Pakistan, and have aligned with a whole network of Islamicist parties there. In the rural areas, they provide what little governance there is, if Stephen Coll’s articles in the New Yorker are to be believed.

However, delusions must be maintained. And so, for example, for the last two years, the London bombings were routinely described as home grown stunts – al Qaeda merely providing a distant, media accessed model. Within a week after the bombings it was apparent that this was nonsense, but only now is it starting to be acknowledged as nonsense in the press – hence this Peter Bergen article.

Of course, the governments that intentionally aborted military action against al Qaeda in the winter of 2001 and spring of 2002, preserving a manipulable threat to accomplish their other, unspeakably shabby foreign policy goals are playing a difficult game – on the one hand, periodically hyping the threat to garner support, and on the other hand, playing down the history of their non-response to the threat, in order to cover up their practical collusion in terrorism. The trick is as old as the bribed cop -- in order to maintain a lucrative beat, one needs a certain quota of arrests and a lot of bluff about law and order, while at the same time one is quietly bribed by the more prosperous criminal. The Blair government, which foolishly pitched in to help the U.S. in Iraq – unlike, say, the cleverer Labour government under Harold Wilson, which managed to avoid sending troops to Vietnam – recklessly made itself a target. In order to avoid the obvious – if British troops weren’t in Basra, there would have been no London bombing – we are fed ridiculous stories of self-administered teen mesmerism in today's version of the Victorian opium den -- the radical mosque (gasp) in which the fiends gather to denounce Israel and such. Issuing from these palaces of wickedness, we are then supposed to believe that boys who can 't get it together enough to hold down jobs as pizza delivery men are suddenly Hollywood like in their coordinated activity, coming up with arms and tactics themselves. Of course, as in the Miami case, sometimes you have to actually create the home grown radicals out of home room dropouts – but you have to produce your quota of threats from the materials on hand, no?

….

The pattern here is evident – when an event occurs in the “war on terrorism’ world, the first instincts of the press are to transmit the official line, no matter how cockeyed and contradictory that line is. Slowly, page A19 stories eat away at that line. Finally, two to three years later, we read some revelation that the official line was self serving bullshit. Luckily for the power structure, by that time, the majority of people have turned off. We live in the era of time lapse schizophrenia – the hottest news is always two years out of date.

This is the opposite of what we are usually told by the media theorists, who love to go on about the cultural meaning of reality shows and how the media has invaded reality and blah blah blah. Rather, it is a retreat to a pre-Vietnam mindset in which the interests of the state, or the pirate crew that roosts, at the moment, in the executive branch, is abjectly colluded in by media companies. Actually, the media era has passed – the era of independent media. The summit of that was in the sixties and seventies. The era in which the media organizations and their technostructure exerted such a monopolistic pull in the market that they were relatively insulated from the economic pressure that could be brought against them by the government. Instead of media taking over reality, reality has taken over the media. The absurd ROI expectations of investors and the fragility of once secure demographics, the new competition posed by international groups, like Murdoch’s News Corp, combine to exert an effect on the media corporations similar to the effect of Japanese car companies on Detroit. The NYT, the Washington Post, the network TV news programs really have, actually, no immediate need to fear the usual mob of angry rightwingers – that market demo is already wrapped up by Fox, Hustler, Guns and Ammo and the Southern Baptist Messenger. Guntoters in Valdosta Georgia aren’t going to stop buying those beautiful diamond necklaces advertised in the NYT Sunday Style section if the Times doesn’t apologize for revealing that the government is looking into our bank accounts. No, their fear is all about the extended well being of the corporation. Surely some Valdosta tv station is owned by a corporation with ties to the NYT. Michael Wolff, the New York media critic, has long contended that we are looking in the wrong places for answers to the curious paralysis of the media in the last five years, its compliance with the transparent lies of the current administration. The answer isn’t in this or that ‘wanker’ – the answer is in the holdings of the media corporations and their constant need for positive interaction with the government in licensing, in preventing competition from gaining entry to various markets in which they hold quasi-monopoly power, in the need, eventually, to get lucrative slices of the internet. In, another words, a dimension that is not filmed and is barely reported on, and that filters into the pre-emptive censorship of everything written in the press or put on tv. I know this first hand – I have often written reviews for conservative leaning newspapers, and I confine those reviews, mostly, to non-political topics. Or, stumbling onto politics, I liberally water down any smart ass crack I may want to make. And then the editor waters down any further remarks that have escaped me.

All the more reason, then, to fight tooth and nail against the executive usurpation of foreign policy. The executive prefers to act in a time frame in which the people are deprived of the information necessary to judge their actions. This is the temptation to which executive power invariably succumbs. Take away that power, reinvigorate the Congressional role as a balance on the executive, paralyze the ability of the War Department to shape U.S. policy, and we would have a more peaceful and prosperous country.

PS - there's a story in the Nouvelle Obs that will get no airplay in the US. Here is the first graf.

The death of Abu Mousab al Zarqawi, the former head of Al Qaeda, Iraq, which the American army has been congratulating itself upon, may owe nothing to the GI search. One of Zarqawi's wives, Oum Mahammed, told an italian magazine on July 2 that her huasband was 'sold to the Americans in exchange for a pause in the hunt for OBL, for he had become 'too powerful' in the eyes of Al Qaeda."

Myself, I don't believe her. I have doubts that OBL is really being 'tracked' that severely. But it is one voice heard from -- and of course this will not ever turn up on the American radar, although many a bogus D.C. expert, knowing nothing about the case, will be gravely quoted.

shout out to kimberly -- LI loves you!

Sometimes, I pity myself.

Here I am, a poor, miserable scribbler given the chance of a lifetime by the coup of 2000 that thrust upon my life a corrupt, authoritarian government; one as specious in all its cotton pickin’ policies and lubberly justifications as a shell game managed by retards. So I pull out the references, I edit my sentences until they bite hard enough, at least, to break the skin, I make with the withering put downs. I dream of Mandlestam, Solzhenitsyn, or, at least, Karl Kraus.

But yesteryear’s dissidents lived in times that, cruel and genocidal as they were, still retained enough respect for writing to get rid of the inconvenient writer. I, in contrast, live in the sticks and stones age: words will never hurt yahoos who have squandered the little literacy they ever acquired on The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

So here I am, about to unsheathe the razor and do myself in – or at least break the plastic on those damn disposable bics and try to get a purchase on the narrow, child safe strip of sharpened alloy – when I get a news flash from Mr. T, our far flung correspondent in NYC. And suddenly, in the darkness, there is a tiniest amount of light, like that shed by an ascending saint in a mannerist painting. Here it is, in its entirety:

Lil' Kim to Be Released From Prison Monday
New York Lawyer
June 30, 2006
By The Associated Press
NEW YORK -- Lil' Kim says she'll be celebrating Independence Day early this year.
The rapper, who was sentenced in September to a year and a day in prison for lying about a shootout outside a hip-hop radio station, is being released Monday, the day before July Fourth.

"I am thrilled to be coming home," Lil' Kim said Thursday in a statement issued by her publicist, Tracy Nguyen. "I thank all my fans for all their letters, as well as my family and friends for all their support throughout the past 10 months."

The entertainer, whose real name is Kimberly Jones, began serving her time at a federal detention center in Philadelphia on Sept. 19. Her lawyer, L. Londell McMillan, noted then that she could be released early for good behavior.

"She has accepted responsibility and handled herself in an exemplary manner," McMillan said Thursday.

The rapper, who will remain under house arrest for 30 days after her release, was convicted of lying to a federal grand jury and in the subsequent trial.

The case stemmed from a gun battle that erupted outside WQHT-FM, known as Hot 97, when Lil' Kim's entourage crossed paths with a rival rap group, Capone-N-Noreaga, whose song "Bang, Bang" contains an insult to her from rival Foxy Brown. One man was hurt in the shootout that followed.

Lil' Kim, who won a Grammy in 2001 for her part in the hit remake of "Lady Marmalade," maintained she hadn't noticed two of her close friends _ who later pleaded guilty to gun charges _ at the scene of the shootout. But jurors at her trial saw radio station security photos that depicted one of them opening a door for her, and witnesses said they saw her at the station with both of them."

montage of american history

The problem is you have a terrorist insurgent population that is wreaking havoc on a hapless Iraqi civilian population that is trying to fight back.

--Condoleeza Rice to Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Affairs Minister.

Five U.S. Army soldiers are being investigated for allegedly raping a young woman, then killing her and three members of her family in Iraq, a U.S. military official told The Associated Press on Friday.
The soldiers also allegedly burned the body of the woman they are accused of raping.
-- AP Story.

On September 11, 1965, The Saigon Daily News, a newspaper published entirely for the English speaking Western community of Vietnam, showed on its front page a large photograph of American servicemen standing with drawn weapons over a heap of what the caption describes as ‘dead VC’ – all lying face down on the ground , and with their hands tied behind their backs. – Bernard Fall, New Republic Magazine, October 9, 1965.

Here's to Fonda Day

Fly for the hills, pick up your feet and let’s go
- Black Angels

Continuing on LI’s Vietnam craze, we saw Winter Soldier last night on DVD. It made us think, among other things, about Jane Fonda. Of the actors who have come out of Hollywood and gotten involved in politics – Ronald Reagan, Charlton Heston, etc. – none had a more beneficial effect than Jane Fonda. For Fonda’s anti-war work in the 70s, LI forgives her for every celebrity sin since.

Fonda helped finance the Winter Soldier trials that exposed, from a grunts eye point of view, what Vietnam was about – a racist and criminal enterprise that massacred Vietnamese, on the one side, and introduced psychosis into the American population, on the other. We have never shed the last black drop of that psychosis – the Freikorps is still alive and well in this country, as the last six years have shown. But things could be much worse. It was the sheer patriotism of such as Fonda that kept it from being worse.

She saw – as the antiwar movement in general saw – that the problem with the United States was similar to the problem faced by an alcoholic. Just as an alcoholic needs, for his own sake, to be de-toxed, so the U.S., for its own sake, needed to be severely demoralized. Stabbing the war in the back was the patriotic duty of every concerned American, and the anti-war movement, back then, was willing to grasp that nettle. We need to take a lesson – we need tribunals like the Winter Soldier tribunals about Iraq. And most of all, we need to spread the news that no patriot will enroll in a mercenary army, bent to the will of an unelected despot.

Unfortunately, the liberal side of the spectrum, now, seeing that the U.S. is embarked on another criminal adventure, in which, once again, thinly disguised massacres are the strategy of choice, still has not grasped the nettle. This is understandable. Fonda, compared to whose high standards of moral action a politburo automaton like Ronald Reagan looks like a monster, has been subject to coordinated vilification ever since she helped, in her own small way, extract the country from the effects of its governing class’ misrule. Of course, in one hundred years, when things clear up, we will, of course, see the Reagans, the Cheneys, the Bushes as the villains they are, peckerwood Richard IIIs, while it is always possible there will be a national Fonda day. Surely we owe it to her and the antiwar movement that every war since Vietnam has been fought by volunteers – and that the system is now spiraling into the purest form of mercenary violence, with duty almost wholly replaced by various compensation packages. I don’t think the era of executive mercenary wars is going to last too long – eventually, there will come a backlash. Eventually, Congress might even assert its authority, instead of acting like a bribed cop, looking the other way as the local Mafia loot a store.

Anyway, here’s to some future Fonda Day.