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some awesome news photos the protests in Quebec and Sao Paulo. |
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Go here: www.stopftaa.org |
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i understand it will open trade doors between North and South America....an extension of NAFTA. Unfortunately, it appears, on the surface, it will neglect certain human rights and standards, in labor and environment. i think the protests indeed beg one fair and simply simple...lets see the treaty. Lets see the text of what our representative Bush is signing. Then we can discuss the issues and ramifications of such a treaty. |
indeedy, making the treaty public seems to be the only protest that has anything factual behind it. |
What is more suspect is WHY they won't release the treaty, not whether the protesters have facts behind their argument. The difference is one could potentially cancel or confirm the other. |
it's not hard to misinform the political youth if you give them something that is inline with their predetermined beliefs about how the system works. i think my point is that you can print up leaflets and fire up a collegiate crowd fairly easily. "What is more suspect is WHY they won't release the treaty" considering how much we don't know, i would consider this EQUALLY suspect. i think the whole thing is suspect. my natural instict would be to side with the protesters on this one. But consider how much the protesters are assuming on this one. nobody really knows anything for sure. so basically, you either look more like the president or the protesters, and based on that you take your sides. nobody really knows anything. |
And, as is with all these treaties the public is totally exempt from the process, which is conducted behind closed doors. The big irony, when you look behind that, is where you see all the bigwigs like Bush and Chertien (sp?) sitting around talking up "Democracy" and the importance of all the nations in the treaty being democratic....and then you have Chertiyene(sp?) speaking out calling the protestors "Enemies of Democracy"----well, that's quite the spin, isn't it? Near as I can figure democracy's being pretty well stomped out----and those people out there getting maced in the streets are the TRUE heroes of democracy....whether they're Johnny-on-the-Trend types or not. |
naw. democracy is not broadcasting your message. i think Bush is more open minded than the majority of those protesters. if the balance of power was shifted and the protesters ran the show, we'd be in no better place. same plot, different props. |
(that should bring Gee and Leaf out of hiding....HEY LEAF how bout the Kings????) |
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Is Bush more Democratic? Somehow I sincerely doubt that....this is the guy, after all, who organized a statewide boycott, as Texas Governor, to make Seagrams drop Interscope....this is the guy whose people have been falling all over themselves to buy up or shut down websites critical of him, to which he says, "there ought to be limits to freedom." YEAH. Well, Auguste Pinochet couldn't have said it better. |
i think that bush is honestly looking to make things better for south-of-mexico. not out of the goodness of his heart, but because the latin population is not yet firmly democrat the way the black population is. and the latin population is growing quickly. but who knows, maybe he's just trying to make it look like things are better. |
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i think bush & co. see a "new" america in latin america. Meaning...a viable workforce, ample resources, with some money in their pockets, products to build and buy they can start the wheel of consumerism -> capitalism |
Where has Gee been lately, anyway? In fact, it seems like a lot of the folks who aren't US citizens aren't around as much lately. |
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of influence he'll have up here. I am scared, but at the same time i know it's only 4 years (let's all hope, kay?) and really, as i've said a thousand times, and the thing that keeps me from voting, Bush-boy can change things, but no government can change things *that* much. Well, not in this present "democracy" anyway. My hope rests in the fact that the sheep here are all so ignorantly bitter towards the states that they fear becoming them, so any ideas that Bush puts forth will be rejected by people in canada because the sheep will think they're becoming "too american". I mean, we had a right-wing christian freak running in our last election too, but he quickly became the laughing stock of the country. Sometimes i have hope. But i'm also scared. and i wish i was in Quebec. but it's 5 hours away. and i have to go to work. |
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So....y'know....like there's any difference. Christ....I'm doing it again, aren't I? Somebody shoot me... |
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He is a pro business, socially right-wing conservative. Simple. Don't be shocked Nothing he does should surprise you. He will become a pinnacle for all protest in years to come. |
What's wrong with NAFTA? Check out Spoken Word stuff by Jello Biafra. Check out film by Michael Moore(esp. THE BIG ONE). Check out writing by Noam Chomsky. Sem----My point exactly. |
here are some links, if anyone cares. http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2001/May/07/ln/ln03a.html http://www.adb.org http://www.hawaii.indymedia.org |
By John Pilger Long before the Soviet Union broke up, a group of Russian writers touring the United States were astonished to find, after reading the newspapers and watching television, that almost all the opinions on all the vital issues were the same. "In our country," said one of them, "to get that result we have a dictatorship. We imprison people. We tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. How do you do it? What's the secret?" The secret is a form of censorship more insidious than a totalitarian state could ever hope to achieve. The myth is the opposite. Constitutional freedoms unmatched anywhere else guard against censorship; the press is a "fourth estate", a watchdog on democracy. The journalism schools boast this reputation, the influential East Coast press is especially proud of it, epitomised by the liberal paper of record, the New York Times, with its masthead slogan: "All the news that's fit to print." It takes only a day or two back in the US to be reminded of how deep state censorship runs. It is censorship by omission, and voluntary. The source of most Americans' information, mainstream television, has been reduced to a set of marketing images shot and edited to the rhythms of a Coca-Cola commercial that flow seamlessly into the actual commercials. Rupert Murdoch's Fox network is the model, with its peep-shows of human tragedy. Non-American human beings are generally ignored, or treated with an anthropological curiosity reserved for wildlife documentaries. Not long ago, Kenneth Jarecke was talking about this censorship. Jarecke is the American photographer who took the breath-catching picture of an Iraqi burnt to a blackened cinder, petrified at the wheel of his vehicle on the Basra Road where he, and hundreds of others, were massacred by American pilots on their infamous "turkey shoot" at the end of the Gulf war. In the United States, Jarecke's picture was suppressed for months after what was more a slaughter than a war. "The whole US press collaborated in keeping silent about the consequences of that war," he said. The famous CBS anchorman Dan Rather told his prime-time audience: "There's one thing we can all agree on. It's the heroism of the 148 Americans who gave their lives so that freedom could live." What he omitted to say was that a quarter of them had been killed, like their British comrades, by other Americans. He made no mention of the Iraqi dead, put at 200,000 by the Medical Educational Trust. That American forces had deliberately bombed civilian infrastructure, such as water treatment plants, was not reported at the time. Six months later, one newspaper, Newsday, published in Long Island, New York, disclosed that three US brigades "used snow plows mounted on tanks to bury thousands of Iraqi soldiers - some still alive - in more than 70 miles of trenches". The other day, both the Washington Post and the New York Times referred to Iraq without mentioning the million people now estimated to have died as a direct result of sanctions imposed, via the UN, by the United States and Britain. That, writes Brian Michael Goss of the University of Illinois, is standard practice. Goss examined 630 articles on sanctions published in the New York Times from 1996 to 1998. In those three years, just 20 articles - 3 per cent of the coverage - were critical of the policy or dwelt upon its civilian impact. The rest reflected the US official line, identifying 21 million people with Saddam Hussein. The scale of the censorship is placed in perspective by Professors John and Karl Mueller, of the University of Rochester. "Even if the UN estimates of the human damage to Iraq are roughly correct," they write, sanctions have caused "the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history." A third of the people of East Timor were put to death by the Suharto dictatorship during Indonesia's 24-year occupation. Yet the American media skirted this epic crime until shortly before the 1999 referendum. Their silence was in striking contrast to the saturation coverage of the "genocide" in Kosovo, used to justify the Nato bombing campaign, and was in line with suppression of the post-bombing disclosure that there was no genocide. In East Timor, the United States helped Suharto execute his invasion, secretly and illegally, with weapons and aircraft. For most of the 24 years of bloody occupation, the US media maintained a virtual blackout on East Timor. In the freest press on earth, humanity is reported in terms of its usefulness to American power. Kosovo was a major story; it demonstrated the "credibility" of Nato and America's control over the Balkans. East Timor was a non-story, "a road bump on the way to Indonesia", according to a State Department official. In a study of the New York Times and Washington Post cited by Goss, 75 per cent of the sources were government officials - a record not that far behind the old Pravda. Truly independent reporters such as Seymour Hersh are described, revealingly, as "dissidents" and "advocates". What is most telling is the media's presumption of innocence of the rapacious American imperial role, rather like Hollywood's post-Vietnam celebration of America as a noble victim. In a lead editorial recently, the New York Times identified the problems of the world, ranging from poverty to terrorism to disease, as "challenges to American safety and well-being". That the United States consumes a quarter of the world's resources, controls the channels of world trade and the institutions of inequality, and squeezes whole nations, such as Iraq, to death, is simply not news. |
Its much easier to control mindless sheep. Baaaaaa |
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nate, where was that article first printed? |
http://www.zmag.org/altmediawatch.htm |