Here's a ten minute interview of Charles Bowden from yesterday's episode of Democracynow.
Chuck pulls no punches.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Carlos Slim, world's richest man
Apparently, not everyone in Mexico is suffering in the current economic climate. Carlos Slim, a Mexican national, is now the world's richest man.
For those of you that think things are OK here in the United States because stock markets are soaring and you made a ton of money off of your year-end Wall Street bonus check, I'd submit that this country is beginning to look a whole lot like Mexico: protected zones containing small numbers of fabulously rich; another relatively small segment of society that derives modest income tending to the needs of the rich; masses of desperately poor outside the wire-enclosed zones of privilege with little or no voice or hope for a better life; laws designed to protect the rich; cops protect their property and prey on the poor.
We're not quite there, but that's where we're headed.
For those of you that think things are OK here in the United States because stock markets are soaring and you made a ton of money off of your year-end Wall Street bonus check, I'd submit that this country is beginning to look a whole lot like Mexico: protected zones containing small numbers of fabulously rich; another relatively small segment of society that derives modest income tending to the needs of the rich; masses of desperately poor outside the wire-enclosed zones of privilege with little or no voice or hope for a better life; laws designed to protect the rich; cops protect their property and prey on the poor.
We're not quite there, but that's where we're headed.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Calling all rebels
I've gotten to the point that all the fucking political parties and organized movements I'm aware of make me sick. So, under current circumstances, I suppose I have become an anarchist.
However, Chris Hedges has written a piece, supposedly from the left, that has nothing to do with the left and everything to do with what I believe.
Calling all rebels.
However, Chris Hedges has written a piece, supposedly from the left, that has nothing to do with the left and everything to do with what I believe.
Calling all rebels.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Friday, March 5, 2010
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Cheese and sauerkraut
I spent part of the day cutting cabbage for sauerkraut. I'm not real crazy about the canned stuff, but fresh sauerkraut is good stuff. And canned kraut is decent enough in a pinch and a good way to store excess cabbage from the garden.
I cut into a block of Leah's homemade raw milk chedder cheese today. The first couple of blocks we tried didn't taste good. I had blamed the failure on inconsistent curing room temperatures. But I wasn't sure.
We rigged up a freezer with a probe and an external thermostat. The block we cut today wasn't cured the whole time in the freezer, but it came out pretty good nonetheless. It had cured 70 days and was alreay what I would call semi-sharp. I'm a sharp chesse man myself, so it can't do anything but get better with time.
Both Leah and I breathed a sigh of relief. We have about a hundred pounds made and curing. It takes a minimum of sixty days for raw milk cheese to properly cure so if this hadn't worked we would have had a pile of worthless shit into which we had invested plenty of hours of time and effort, she more than I.
Halleluiah.
I cut into a block of Leah's homemade raw milk chedder cheese today. The first couple of blocks we tried didn't taste good. I had blamed the failure on inconsistent curing room temperatures. But I wasn't sure.
We rigged up a freezer with a probe and an external thermostat. The block we cut today wasn't cured the whole time in the freezer, but it came out pretty good nonetheless. It had cured 70 days and was alreay what I would call semi-sharp. I'm a sharp chesse man myself, so it can't do anything but get better with time.
Both Leah and I breathed a sigh of relief. We have about a hundred pounds made and curing. It takes a minimum of sixty days for raw milk cheese to properly cure so if this hadn't worked we would have had a pile of worthless shit into which we had invested plenty of hours of time and effort, she more than I.
Halleluiah.
The war next door
A recent glimpse of Juarez, compliments of Chuck Bowden.
High Country News
An excerpt:
If the press reports this sort of thing, it is framed as part of a War on Drugs that must be won. These stories are fables at best. There is no serious War on Drugs. Rather, there is violence, nourished by the money to be made from drugs. And there are U.S. industries whose primary lifeblood comes from fighting a war on drugs. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, has 225,000 employees and a budget of $42 billion, part of which is aimed at making America safe from Mexico and Mexicans. Narcotics officers in the U.S. cost at least $40 billion a year. The world's largest prison industry would collapse without the intake of drug convicts, and, in recent years, of illegal Mexican migrants. And around the republic there are big new federal courthouses rising that would be cobwebbed without the steady flow from drug busts and the Mexican poor coming north.
The border now is a bundle of issues: drugs, terrorists, violence spilling across, illegal aliens, free-trade economists insisting on open borders, humanitarians calling for no more deaths. On the ground, this hardly matters. The giant wall being slowly built across the southern flank of the U.S. hardly matters. In the Altar Valley south of Tucson, the wall was barely in place before gates were cut, the hinges facing the Mexican side.
What is happening is natural. And like some natural things, deadly.
...
It is early January as I write. This weekend, over 40 people were murdered in Juarez, a city once hailed as the poster child of free trade, the city with the lowest unemployment rate in Mexico. The killings -- three of them women -- had little touches. A double amputee was shot in the head and then left on a dirt road wrapped in a blanket. Another man was found with his severed head on his chest -- the tongue, eyes and nose had been removed. A narco-message was left on yellow cardboard and weighted down with two severed arms. Such slaughter usually goes unnoticed in the U.S. press. Should it actually come to the attention of our newspapers, it simply will be written off as part of a cartel war. This is a fiction. Almost all the dead are poor people, not drug-enriched grandees. And though we give Mexico half a billion dollars a year to encourage its army to fight drug merchants, this alleged war has a curious feature: Almost no soldiers ever die. For example, in Juarez, over 4,200 citizens have been slain in two years. In the same period, with 7,000 to 10,000 soldiers in town, the military has suffered three dead.
...
Read the rest at the link.
High Country News
An excerpt:
If the press reports this sort of thing, it is framed as part of a War on Drugs that must be won. These stories are fables at best. There is no serious War on Drugs. Rather, there is violence, nourished by the money to be made from drugs. And there are U.S. industries whose primary lifeblood comes from fighting a war on drugs. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, has 225,000 employees and a budget of $42 billion, part of which is aimed at making America safe from Mexico and Mexicans. Narcotics officers in the U.S. cost at least $40 billion a year. The world's largest prison industry would collapse without the intake of drug convicts, and, in recent years, of illegal Mexican migrants. And around the republic there are big new federal courthouses rising that would be cobwebbed without the steady flow from drug busts and the Mexican poor coming north.
The border now is a bundle of issues: drugs, terrorists, violence spilling across, illegal aliens, free-trade economists insisting on open borders, humanitarians calling for no more deaths. On the ground, this hardly matters. The giant wall being slowly built across the southern flank of the U.S. hardly matters. In the Altar Valley south of Tucson, the wall was barely in place before gates were cut, the hinges facing the Mexican side.
What is happening is natural. And like some natural things, deadly.
...
It is early January as I write. This weekend, over 40 people were murdered in Juarez, a city once hailed as the poster child of free trade, the city with the lowest unemployment rate in Mexico. The killings -- three of them women -- had little touches. A double amputee was shot in the head and then left on a dirt road wrapped in a blanket. Another man was found with his severed head on his chest -- the tongue, eyes and nose had been removed. A narco-message was left on yellow cardboard and weighted down with two severed arms. Such slaughter usually goes unnoticed in the U.S. press. Should it actually come to the attention of our newspapers, it simply will be written off as part of a cartel war. This is a fiction. Almost all the dead are poor people, not drug-enriched grandees. And though we give Mexico half a billion dollars a year to encourage its army to fight drug merchants, this alleged war has a curious feature: Almost no soldiers ever die. For example, in Juarez, over 4,200 citizens have been slain in two years. In the same period, with 7,000 to 10,000 soldiers in town, the military has suffered three dead.
...
Read the rest at the link.
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