The Effect of the Micheletti Regime on Honduran Businesses Big and Small

I've commented before on the impact that the Honduran coup and Micheletti regime's actions may have had on business elites, and how those business elites in turn may have played an important role in the negotiation of the end of the crisis. However, as the Christian Science Monitor reminds us, the Micheletti regime's actions also directly negatively affected small- and mid-sized businesses:

Doris Midence, a snack bar employee at La Tigra National Park outside the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, has the empty gaze of someone with too much time on her hands.

"Customers are down by half," she says, reorganizing gum and candy bars. "Between curfews and protests, people are not leaving their homes."

[...] But even if the curfews are being lifted, the economic ramifications of Latin America's worst crisis for decades could endure much longer.

Tourists who typically visit the northern Bay Islands, for example, are opting for other places in the Caribbean to scuba dive. Foreign investment has dropped. Cuts in aid have stalled construction of roads. And the nation's consumers, some facing their own unemployment or simply saving in the face of political instability, are no longer buying shoes or furniture or other non-essentials.

"Since June 28 demand has declined dramatically," says Jose Enrique Nuñez, the president of the country's national association of small and medium-sized businesses. "It has created chaos, and that chaos is causing us to collapse."

I think it's safe to say that one of the biggest long-term damages that the coup and Micheletti regime caused was economic. To be clear, I'm not some neo-Marxist who sees material struggle and economics as the source of all historical struggle or anything. However, the negotiation has theoretically returned Zelaya to office (though Honduras' Congress is moving particularly slowly in finalizing the act), and so (for now) world opposition to Honduras had faded away; what is more, with the elections (presumably) being held under Zelaya's watch, for now it appears that there won't be any long-term political blackballing of Congress in the international community.

However, the economic consequences of the military coup and Micheletti's actions both domestically and in the broader global economy are definitely going to continue to manifest themselves for years to come. Honduars was already struggling with the global economic crisis, losing hundreds of millions of dollars in trade and forecasting a shrinking GDP this year, according to the article. While wealth does not "trickle down," economic crisis often does, and this certainly is the case in Honduras. As foreign businesses and tourists have pulled out and looked for alternatives, the small- and mid-sized businesses have been adversely effected, too; financial loss has not just been the domain of major business leaders in the country.

And thanks to curfews and repression, small businesses have suffered doubly, as Hondurans were prevented or intimidated from going to the streets to buy basic goods from these businesses. The final part of the article really hammers this point home:

"The country is paralyzed," Mario Canahuati, a businessman and strategist for presidential contender Porfirio Lobo, said last month. He says that the poorest Hondurans suffer most. "The big companies will survive," he says.

The smaller ones might not. Mr. Nuñez says his business association generates about 30,000 jobs but since June 28, according to a survey of its members nationwide, 35 percent of those jobs have been lost. He says that intermittent curfews that force people into their homes, unemployment, and general anxiety are keeping people away from stores, which is having a ripple impact all the way down the chain. "No one is paying more for the crisis than small companies," he says.

While that seems dire, it also seems like a tragically accurate assessment, and really hits home just how reprehensible the Micheletti regime was. It wasn't just that it clamped down on basic civil rights, tried to perpetuate itself under the most illogical and falsest of "legal" excuses, and demonstrated a clear power-hungry tendency. It also managed wage open warfare on everyday Honduran citizens who protested the clear violation of democratic process in their country, and even as the regime (hopefully) comes to an end, those same everyday Hondurans who own or work for small- or mid-sized businesses will continue to feel the economic ramifications of Micheletti's actions for years to come. Micheletti may be out of office soon, but his ruinous legacy isn't going away anytime soon.

Honduras Bans Morning-After Pill

And now, some non-coup bad news from Honduras:

A new law has taken effect in Honduras prohibiting the consumption and marketing of the morning-after pill in the Central American country.

The law was passed by the Honduran Congress at the beginning of the year with backing from the Medical College of Honduras, which pointed out that the pill has an abortifacient effect making it unconstitutional.

The Honduran Congress argued that the drug would “gravely endanger the health of the Honduran population, especially women who are able to get pregnant.”

Though the law's origin pre-dates the Micheletti regime, this is still some pretty bad timing. Taking away reproductive rights from women is always a major step backward, and especially in a law like this, when women's options on birth control are already limited (and abortion is illegal).

Perhaps the worst moment comes at the end of the brief article, when the Latin American director of the Population Research Institute and general chauvinist pig Carlos Polo commented that the law is helping Hondurans in "freeing ourselves from an inoperative and costly method that has grave adverse effects for women." Yes - those evil feminists are out to destroy women's bodies through vague "grave adverse effects" and repress them with things like freedom of choice in reproductive rights. Classy.

Historical Image of the Day

Mr. America, 1968, Jim Haislop

What I Learned from Election 09

1. Money can buy you an election in NYC, but not by nearly as much as you thought.

2. "Red States" are a myth. North Carolina elected an openly gay mayor of Chapel Hill and the first Democratic mayor of Charlotte in three decades.

3. "Blue states," sadly, are also a myth, as Corzine goes down in Jersey. Any bets on whether he'll return to Goldman Sachs?

4. Boring Blue Dogs don't win close elections, progressive, dynamic reform candidates win close elections. See Deeds, Creigh, losing a state that Obama won fairly easily.

5. Palin is still poison. And Democrats have two more vote in the House.

6. People are still willing to vote to take away the rights of others. Dear Maine, I am sorely disappointed.

7. While gay marriage is still scary, apparently gay politicians, at least in cities, aren't.

8. Most importantly, there IS no coherent narrative from last night. Maybe the only thing we can say is that organizing matters, GOTV mattters, and the media don't have a clue.

New Blog Worth Checking Out

Michael Allison, a political science professor at the University of Scranton, has a new blog called Central American Politics that is well worth checking out for those interested in Central America and Latin America more generally.

Asshat of the Day

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. And if he thinks Zelaya is America's "enemy," then he was clearly outraged back in 2006. It was in that article with......oh, wait, he never complained about Bush's meeting. Nevermind.

Historical Image of the Day

Protests at Democratic National Convention, Chicago, 1968

Is Jamaica the Most Homophobic Country in the Americas?

You can definitely make a strong case for it:

Today has been proclaimed 'Gay Eradication Day' by residents of the McGregor Gully community in East Kingston. Residents say that they will be taking action as a two-week notice given to all gays and lesbians to flee the community has now expired.

THE STAR learnt that about two weeks ago angry residents who declared that they were fed up with seeing the activities of several gay persons in their community, ordered that they leave by today or suffer the consequences.

Some residents who admitted to THE STAR that they are a part of the "gay clearing out" scheme said that it is being done to protect their families and the community on a whole.

Most Americans (in a different kind of base stereotyping) think of Jamaica as an island of happiness, home to marijuana and Bob Marley. Few realize that Jamaica is actually home to rampant homophobia that isn't even remotely veiled. Attacks on homosexuals on the island are not limited to verbal assault; Jamaican homosexuals often face very real violence if they come out of the closet, with nowhere to turn. Even the police get in on the act, committing abuses based on sexual orientation. It would be nice if this despicable (and that's being charitable) act of this community in Kingston was abnormal. Unfortunately, it's not - it's symptomatic of broader attitudes towards homosexual men and women in Jamaica, and there's just no sign of any aid coming to those who are threatened anytime soon.

An Apology

For those who have elections in their states/municipalities today, go out and vote, so that this apology might ring a little less true.

"I thought it was just someone doing an accurate impression of Glenn Beck talking normally"

The Onion once again shows why it's absolutely brilliant.

Historical Image of the Day

This week's theme is the United States in 1968.

Elvis Presley near the time of his comeback special on television.

Chilean Ex-Soldiers Willing to Reveal What They Saw During the Pinochet Era

Some (non-officer) Chilean soldiers have begun to seek pensions, something that has been denied them in the past because of their roles as the "grunts" of the dictatorship. In return for gaining amnesty and being eligible for pensions, they will reveal some of the secrets of the basic functioning of the dictatorship's repressive apparatuses at the local level.

This gets into a really sticky question of who is or isn't a victim, but I'm inclined to agree that some of these soldiers very well may also be victims of the dictatorship. I realize that sounds silly up front. It's a military dictatorship - isn't saying the military is a "victim" too just an affront to those whose families really did suffer? The short answer would seem to be "yes," but the biggest and easiest trap in studying and writing about military dictatorships is the assumption that "the military" is a unified whole, when that's never the case; even when scholars know better, we often find ourselves having to refer to "the military" as shorthand, which just further creates the impression that there was some unified whole that was imposing repression, authoritarianism, torture, and state-sponsored murder on its nation's citizenry.

But as anybody who can studies dictatorships in detail can tell you, the idea of a single "military" is never accurate. Firstly, there is the fact that there are always dissensions within the highest levels of the military leadership itself. Pinochet didn't start off as the sole leader of Chile; he was part of a junta, but through power-plays and the removal of those who disagreed with him (including high-ranking air force brigadier generals and naval admirals, as well as other high-ranking generals), he was able to consolidate power. In Brazil, there were five military generals who occupied the post of president in its 21 year dictatorship (1964-1985), and scholars generally agree that they really represented two groups: "moderates," and "hard-liners." While I've always wondered if that categorization hasn't been too simple, it holds up in the documents, and indeed, in the mid-1970s, Ernesto Geisel (one of the "moderates") had to do some tricky maneuvering to prevent the hard-liners from taking control again (after two hardline generals and a brief junta held the presidency from 1967 to 1974). Rarely among dictatorships do you see any kind of unity even among the leadership; even when generals and military leaders publicly seem to be on the same page, there is often conflict behind what Derek Sayer called the "mask of the state."

Beyond high-level internal disagreements, militaries also often see disagreements between the officer corps (who are often highly-educated men from middle- and upper-class families) and the soldiers (who are often comparatively speaking, less-educated working-class men who are drafted or who enlisted for financial or professional reasons). In this kind of structure, multiple dividing factors can and do emerge - hierarchical differences, cultural differences, political differences, and class differences. Many times in Latin America, these men joined the army in peacetime, or turned to it as a last resort for stable income, and suddenly found themselves being ordered by their superiors to arrest, torture, and even kill civilians.

This brings us back to Chile. It's not a big secret that many soldiers were horrified at what they had to do, and often tried to avoid duties like torture. Indeed, a particularly harrowing account in this collection of eyewitness reports from Chile in 1973 (a book that I cannot recommend strongly enough for those interested in the fall of Allende) tells of how one soldier refused to arrest the residents of a poor neighborhood in the wake of Allende's overthrow, and his commanding officer shot him dead on the spot and said the same would happen to anybody else who did not follow orders. And for those who did follow orders and survived, it's clear that many of these conscripts are still suffering severe psychological and personal trauma for what they had to do during the Pinochet regime:

In a lengthy interview with The Associated Press, Mellado said the former draftees also are victims — forced into service as minors and made to do unspeakable things or be killed themselves. He said many have told him of horrifying crimes they want to get off their chests.

One confessed to shooting an entire family. Another — now an alcoholic who sleeps in the street in Santiago — said he was forced to drown a 7-year-old boy in a barrel of hardening plaster. Others describe harrowing torture sessions, and loading bodies onto helicopters to be dumped at sea.

"Our mission was to stand guard outside, and listen to their screams," said former draftee Jose Paredes, who described his service at the Tejas Verdes torture center in an AP interview. "They would end up destroyed, torn apart, their teeth and faces broken."

"There are things that I've always said I will take to the grave," Paredes said, his grizzled face running with tears as he named a half-dozen officers who he said gave the orders. "I've never told this to anyone."

When you read passages like that, it's hard not to see how many soldiers in the lower ranks also ended up being victims of authoritarian regimes.

Now, this isn't to say some soldiers, be it in Chile, Brazil, or elsewhere, did not relish in their duties, or at least have little problem with their role in combating "subversion." Just as with the leadership, the non-officer soldier corps is diverse in its attitudes, opinions, beliefs, etc. Nonetheless, many men in multiple dictatorships in Latin America found themselves put in the position of having to risk their income and their lives on one hand, or torturing and killing innocent civilians on the other, and while it's easy to say from a distance that they never should have tortured, the long-term and real-time consequences of their actions at the time no doubt made things much more difficult.

In that regard, I think the soldiers in the Chilean case mentioned at the beginning here have a strong case. Some would say, "well, they should just offer up the information anyways." Perhaps. But just as it's easy to say that they shouldn't have tortured in the first place, it's easy to say they should just cough up what they know when you're not in their position. Is it possible that some of these men are just in it for the money? Again, perhaps. Amnesty laws in general are tricky matters. But, as the AP article points out, in spite of the prosecutions of men like Chile, and in spite of what we know about how torture functioned under the Pinochet regime, it's also true that, "in nearly two decades of democracy since then, less than 8 percent of the disappeared have been found." Thus, at the end of the day, if the conscripts' accounts are accurate and shed new light on how exactly the mechanisms of repression and torture functioned (because, after all, it wasn't Pinochet who was in the cells demanding information from victims), then I think it's a worthy endeavor to pursue.

An Addendum to Honduras: Brazil's Role

In my original post below, I wanted to include Brazil's role, but had neither a decent way of stating that role nor a good place to put it. Fortunately, Randy perfectly and concisely summarizes the importance Brazil has played in the Honduran crisis, in his "winners and losers in Honduras" post. Among the winners:

Lula. Brazil's president's vigorous leadership on the issue was a model for the region: unwavering, but not bombastic; providing support behind the scenes (e.g., the Brazilian embassy for Zelaya's refuge), while maintaining diplomatic pressure was a sign of true diplomatic skill, a trait common in Brazil, arguably Latin America's most skilled diplomats.

I couldn't put it better myself.

Album Review - Fuck Buttons, "Tarot Sport"

It's been way too long since I've done one of these, and I've heard plenty of albums that merited reviews (both good and bad). But last week, I got two albums I'd been highly anticipating, and both are so good as to merit the revival of reviews (though the other will wait a little bit).

At the beginning of this year, I sang high praises for Fuck Buttons' debut album Street Horrrsing, which I now consider one of the two best albums of last year. As I'd put it in January, Street Horrrsing wasn't just amazing; it was that rare breed of album "that you didn't even realize you'd been waiting forever to have until it came out." The original template was simple, yet amazing - danceable electronics, deep bass, beautiful glockenspiel-like chimes, and Come to Daddy style screams. It was one of the more visceral things I've heard in 10 years, and it was, for all appearances, perfect. The fact that iTunes tells me I've listened to it 47 times in the past year (and that doesn't count the times I listened to it in CD format) says plenty.

Thanks to the vagaries of Amazon, I didn't have Tarot Sport, the Buttons' follow-up, until this past Friday, in spite of ordering it before it was released 10 days previous. While I held out from listening to it online, I couldn't help but read some of the reviews. All seemed to like it, but all also said the same thing: "like Street Horrrsing, only different." They particularly highlighted that some of the deep rumbling bass and screams were gone. Given that that was what originally drew me in, I was...not skeptical, but wondering if I'd like Tarot Sport as much. So, do I?

I don't know yet - it's still too soon (47+ listens vs. 6 listens isn't exactly a fair comparison). But it's really, really, really fucking close. It's true - the screams-on-beauty-on-chest-rumbling-bass-line is gone. But it's still a pretty powerful wallop, and it's perhaps more consistent. That's not to say Street Horrrsing is inconsistent - far from it - but personally, the beauty and ferocity of track opener "Sweet Love for Planet Earth," followed by the tribal-ish drums and haunted screams of "Ribs Out" were always so amazing, haunting, stunning, to me, that the rest of the album felt less....I don't know. Fuck Buttons' second album, though, while lacking that "letdown" (though that's hardly a fair or adequate term for their debut), doesn't have that so-called "letdown". In part, it's because nothing is quite as amazing (or, better yet, amazing in the same way) as the opening of Street Horrrsing, but that makes the rest of Tarot Sport that much better.

As for the "the same, only different," aspect, that's also a fair assessment. "The Lisbon Maru" reaches "Sweet Love for Planet Earth's" pulsing, throbbing feel, but with a sense of depth and layering lacking on the opening track of the debut, even while also lacking the screams that gave the debut's opener such a punch. And tracks like "Olympians" and "Flight of the Feathered Serpent" are more dance-able than anything on Street Horrrsing, even while maintaining the simultaneous absolute beauty and sheer aural assault of the first album.

And that's really where the difference between the two albums rest. It's not that Andrew Hung and John Power have gotten lazy, or rested on their laurels, or even fallen into a holding pattern or a sophomore slump. Tarot Sport is worthy of its predecessor, even while changing the soudn somewhat. Where Fuck Buttons' first album made you want to weep at its sheer beauty and ugly force, the second makes you want to nod your head for 60 minutes. In fact, with Tarot Sport, Fuck Buttons have managed to achieve what we often hope so many bands will do with their second album, but what so few manage to do: hold on to everything that made us love the first album, even while transforming and refining the sound so that it's simultaneously familiar and amazingly different. The expectations I had for Hung's and Power's second album were unfair after becoming familiar with Street Horrrsing; the quality of Tarot Sport is so remarkable, my expectations for their third album, while perhaps unfair, are out of this galaxy.

It's just that good.

Historical Image of the Day

Gusher, Winkler County, Texas, 1928

Trying to Explain the Honduran Crisis and Its Resolution

Many (myself included) have wondered what caused the sudden shift in attitudes between Zelaya and Micheletti that resulted in the agreement in Honduras this week, with Zelaya returning to office (pending the legislature's approval) after months of disagreement and strife. While I've yet to see any of the agents involved in the process coming out to explicitly state what the catalyst may have been, some people are offering explanations:

-This newspaper article suggests Micheletti had only wanted to stall the whole time, and that the possibility of tainted elections was a major factor in his finally agreeing to points which he had previously outright rejected over the previous 4 months. Although it doesn't explicitly say so, the suggestion that Micheletti feared the new government would be "tainted" does indicate one of the suggestions I made last week: that global opposition was pretty important here.

-Another argument that this article seems to be tacitly making is that the opposition among many within the Church played a decent role, too, in that he'd lost support among a major non-political (in the strictest sense of the word) group, too.

-Some Costa Rican sources (perhaps unsurprisingly) feel that it was Arias's efforts to craft an agreement all could accept throughout the summer that was important here, as it laid the groundwork for the current agreement.

-Finally, Greg points us to Raj's argument that it was the Honduran people themselves (and Zelaya to an also-important-but-lesser extent) that forced Micheletti's hand.

Each of these has its particular merits, but I think some are more important than others. While Arias's work is important in the grand scale, little has changed between his proposal in July and the current agreement, so while I think it did help lay the groundwork, I don't really see it as a catalyst. Again, little changed in the plan between July, when Micheletti refused to ever acknowledge it, and this week, when Micheletti suddenly had a change of heart. That's not to say Arias's role was unimportant over the entire process, but in terms of the events of this past week, I think it's pretty clear that the agency on this rests more on Micheletti and Zelaya than Arias.

Likewise, while gaining criticisms from the Church is an important factor, and while the timing is interesting (the Church condemns the human rights abuses under Micheletti just as the agreement is being reached), I think the timing is also coincidental.

I think La Opinion and RAJ get closer - Micheletti definitely wanted to stall as long as he could, and I think the growing opposition to any government elected under his regime played a role. Likewise, I think RAJ is on the right track in saying it was the Honduran people who forced the issue. Still, I don't find any one of these reasons compelling in and of itself, for a simple reason that perhaps seems wishy-washy, but that I think history has proven time and again, and that is:

Things are too complex for it to be any "one" factor.

Put another way, I think all of these factors, and numerous others, played a role. Honduras's economy and image has been hit hard with the global opposition to Micheletti, and while he was willing to weather that for 6 months or so, I think the prospect of the next four-year government also being jaundiced in the eyes of the world made Micheletti "change his mind" somewhat. He managed to achieve what he wanted (preventing any real reforms in Honduras under Zelaya, who will now effectively be a 3-month lame duck), and, perhaps perversely figured getting out now was what would be best for Honduras down the line (in what was perhaps the first time Micheletti was actually concerned with what's best for Honduras during this crisis). I wouldn't be remotely surprised to find out that this is effectively what the U.S. negotiators suggested, and that Micheletti, who's proven he isn't a political idiot (even if he's a repressive, semi-authoritarian, power-hungry man), saw the writing on the wall.

But again, that wasn't all. I absolutely think the Honduran people played a major role. In fact, I'd extend this beyond RAJ's argument. Time may prove me wrong, but I don't think it was just the people in opposition to the coup, or Zelaya, or leaders in the church; as I said on Monday, I'm fairly certain that business leaders may have played a role in this. Greg alludes to the power of informal contacts, and while he doesn't really buy into them in the case of Chile, I'm not convinced they didn't play an important part here. Just as Micheletti may have seen the trouble Honduras would face internationally if the elections happened under his regime, I'm sure business leaders also knew that four years of prejudice against Honduras would really hit them hard. This isn't to say the business leaders were more important than the Honduran people; after all business leaders are Honduran people, too. But I think this all gets at just how complex these processes in general (and this one specifically) are. Numerous groups within and outside of Honduras all had their own reasons for wanting to see this crisis finally come to an end, be it the political elites who feared Zelaya's attempted reforms, the people who stood up against Micheletti's repression, the business elites trying to protect their privileges, the international community standing up for democratic processes, or any other number of voices and opinions, and I think all of their voices played a role in the resolution happening, and happening this week (as opposed to July, September, or next January).

It well may take years for us to really understand the events of these past four-plus months in Honduras, though no doubt many explanations and efforts (including this one) will emerge among political scientists, historians, human rights activists, and others. While some will try to give more credit to one group than another, or explain the shift through just one group or catalyzing factor, I think at the end of the day, the answer to the question "why did the resolution happen when it did, and what caused it?" will be the same as the answer to so many other questions: "Well, it's complicated..."

Nice World Series coverage, Fox. You want to come kick my dog, too?

I don't get any television networks, so while I've paid close attention via the internet, I haven't been able to watch any of the baseball playoffs this year. However, as an Indians fan, that may be for the better this World Series. In addition to the typical crimes against intelligence and decency that Buck and McCarver manage to wage every year, apparently, there was also this during Game One:

The pain [for Indians fans] was there, assisted by the FOX graphic showing the 2009 post-season records for both Lee and Sabathia accompanied by pictures of each still donning Chief Wahoo, with the title “You Still Have LeBron” delivering the final knockout punch to an unwitting city that once again was forced to come to grips with their second-class status.

OK, it's bad enough you had to point out that yes, we didn't get to keep either of the last two AL Cy Young winners. But rubbing it in with the "LeBron" comment? Barring the return of Arrested Development to TV, I think it's safe to say I will never, ever, ever watch another Fox program as long as I live. Perhaps I'll even add "pissing on Rupert Murdoch's grave" to my list of things to do in my lifetime.

Oh, and Fox?

Fuck. You.

Bad Days in American History: October 31, 1918

Some things are hard to date. Disease epidemics are one of them. Ultimately, in discussing them, you are often placing an arbitrary date upon a long-term epidemic. You don't usually know when it starts so you are kind of winging it.

That's what we are going to do today. By Halloween of 1918, death was not just something to mock and imitate. The nation was in a full bore epidemic of influenza. The dreaded Spanish flu had reached the United States in full force.

That year, an extra strong strain of flu was circling the globe. It's believed it started in China, but that is very difficult to pin down. In an era before rapid transportation (something that would contribute mightily to the rapid spread of AIDS), perhaps this plague might have remained in Europe and Asia. But this same year also saw the end of World War I. Soldiers were living in trenches in France, often in damp, horrid conditions. They caught this flu while fighting against the Germans. Ships were crossing the Atlantic almost daily, so long as they avoided German submarines. The flu quickly spread to the United States.

Today, we fear disease epidemics, but we don't really know what they are like. Swine flu (which I will perennially call it after that Israeli minister protested that this was offensive to his people, something that is so ridiculous as to be mocked for eternity) has the potential to reach epidemic proportions, but a true epidemic is a mass killer. This flu is an unusual killer only in the 24 hour news cycle. Pre-World War II America saw real epidemics--yellow fever, smallpox, influenza, cholera--and we have nothing to compare it to today except for AIDS, and that really only for those of us who remember the 1980s. Modern medicine is so far advanced that we can contain most potential epidemics; even HIV is not quite preventable, and we also developed high-quality medications to give those who contract it a fighting chance to live a long life.

The 1918 flu epidemic changed the world. An estimated 675,000 Americans died of the disease. Life expectancy in this country dropped by 10 years. The death rate from flu for those aged 15-34 rose by 20 times in one year. The war experience made everything worse--we already found our physicians and hospital facilities seriously overtaxed dealing with the thousands coming home with mustard gas lung burns and other war wounds. And we simply did not have the medical facilities we do today. People died all the time in 1918 of preventable illnesses anyway; to add a worldwide epidemic on top of it was a recipe for disaster. 1/4 of Americans and 1/5 of the world's population came down with the flu that year, including President Woodrow Wilson while he was in France trying to dictate to everyone what the post-war world should look like, selling out colonized peoples, and the like.

The lesson from the 1918 flu epidemic is that preventive medicine and technology can do a lot to help us. But it can't do anything. The technologies we have used to fight illness have had unintended consequences, particularly the development of drug-resistant super strains of illness. Eventually, we will deal with a real epidemic again. To our credit, I think we know this, thus the real worries every time we see a West Nile or SARS or swine flu. Less to our credit is the panic that results with each of these. It'd be nice to see rational policy-based responses to these problems and I think the government has generally done a good job handling these situations (with Reagan's handling of AIDS being a huge exception and arguably the worst thing he ever did, though union members and Central Americans would have something to say about that). But the 24 hour news cycle has acted with tremendous irresponsibility in covering these issues, whipping up a foaming panic with each death and creating a feeding frenzy of fear.

A lot of the details in this post came from this Stanford based website, which also has a lot of great links that you can check out if you want to read more.

Facial Hair of the Weekend

Der Bart (the Beard) of philosopher Karl Marx, who no doubt believed in the dialectical nature of facial hair.

Historical Image of the Day

Oil equipment, Golden Meadow, Louisiana, 1939

Historical Image of the Day

Huntington Beach, California, 1920s.

In Defense of Eric Wedge

While I liked him as a man, and while it was tough, I knew this summer that it was time to let Eric Wedge go. I bear him no ill will, and really hope he ends up somewhere else pretty quickly. Still, whether you loved or hated the man, I'll say this in his defense:

Any ball coach who listens to Merle Haggard is alright by me.

Apt Analogy of the Day

Joe Lieberman is the "balloon boy dad" of the Senate.

Agreement Reached in Honduras (?)

There have been so many reports over the months that an agreement between Micheletti and Zelaya was close, only to be wrong, that this almost seems hard to believe. Still, the New York Times and other news agencies are reporting it as if it were a done deal:

A lingering political crisis in Honduras seemed to be nearing an end on Friday after the de facto government agreed to a deal that would allow Manuel Zelaya, the deposed president, to return to office.

The government of Roberto Micheletti, which had refused to let Mr. Zelaya return, signed an agreement with Mr. Zelaya’s negotiators late Thursday that would pave the way for the Honduran Congress to restore the ousted president and allow him to serve out the remaining three months of his term.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton confirmed on Friday that Mr. Zelaya and Mr. Micheletti had approved what she called “an historic agreement.”

The "final details" have to be hammered out still (allegedly today), so I'm still not quite willing to believe this is a done deal. Still, there are not-illegitimate reasons to think this may take place. Micheletti has managed to stall to the point that Zelaya's final 3 months (if he is in fact to return) could be some of the lamest of lame-duck terms. If he wanted to prevent Hondurans from having more say in their government (something towards which Zelaya was moving), then Micheletti's tactics were most likely successful - if Zelaya's government is going to be a "reconciliation and unity" government, as one of the details proposes, I just don't think the previous quasi-populist bluster of Zelaya will be as strong as it was prior to the coup. That's not to say it won't happen at all, but I would be somewhat surprised.

Another particularly interesting point is the fact that this settlement is finally reached after Obama dispatched an envoy to Honduras to try to negotiate an end to this mess. I'm very curious as to why this agreement happened now - are the negotiators just that good? Were there some "suggestions" made that neither Micheletti nor Zelaya (and especially the former) could not refuse? What exactly made these two men come closer to an agreement than they had, and what role did the U.S. negotiators have? (And I suppose it's possible they didn't play a catalyzing role, but I find that highly unlikely).

Of course, if Obama's dispatching of the negotiators was the catalyst for this change, I can already imagine that many (especially on the left) will condemn Obama for not acting sooner. The reasoning will probably go as follows: well, the U.S. refused to get involved, and when it finally did, it was able to restore the democratically elected leadership, so it should have made this move back in July or August or anytime before the end of October.

This criticism will fall short for a few reasons. No doubt, many will ask why, if it just took some negotiators from the U.S. to resolve things, why didn't this happen sooner? But this way of thinking gives too much credit to the U.S. and not enough to other political contingencies and actors. For example, as I alluded to above, just because Micheletti has (apparently) agreed with these negotiators at the end of October does not mean he would have agreed with them in mid-July or late-August. Certainly, the global response against his regime has played a part in all of this; after all, many governments (including the U.S.) were saying they could not recognized elections that were held under a coup-installed government. For a man whose hope was that elections would allow Honduras to return to "normalcy," those were more than empty threats. Additionally, to blame the U.S., and the Obama administration specifically, forgets particularly important aspects of this whole timeline, such as the fact that Zelaya wasn't even in Honduras (and thus didn't have the negotiating power he currently has) until the end of September, when Zelaya surprised the world. At that point, the negotiation process entered a whole new phase, and I don't think it's unfair to say that Honduras had to try to work this out itself (with Zelaya's new, more powerful negotiating position) before actors like the U.S. could get involved. Thirdly, we cannot forget the importance non-political actors may have had in this alleged agreement. Certainly, the Zelaya supporters in the embassy and the demonstrators who had taken to the streets periodically over the last several months had made their voices heard, but they were not the only ones. I can't help but wonder if the country's business leaders may have also had a role in this. After all, they were the first ones to feel the economic pinch of the global condemnation of the Micheletti regime, and they have made efforts before to bring this to an end before. And to be clear, I'm not saying that they had more sway or importance than the thousands who took to the streets, often risking their lives, to protest the coup and make their voices heard. What I am saying is that I suspect that these negotiations were most likely much more complex and part of a much longer process than we could possibly know for certain now. Unless Micheletti or Zelaya (or both) come out and say, "well, we weren't going to do this at all, but then the negotiators convinced us," I don't believe Obama's action was the only one that had any role in this agreement being reached. And even if Micheletti and Zelaya openly say this, I won't necessarily believe them - to do so would be to refuse the power of the Honduran people themselves in this matter.

I still write all of this with a bit of hesitancy; too many times, reports in this vein have emerged, only to break down at the last minute, and there's still a window of opportunity for another breakdown here. Still, this is being reported with more certainty and detail than any other previous "agreement," so this could happen. If it does, it will finally bring an end to what should have been resolved long ago (indeed, what probably never should have happened), and I suspect that it will be through the actions not just of the U.S. negotiators, but of the Honduran people, business leaders, Oscar Arias, the OAS, the European Union, Brazil, global economics, and numerous other factors and agents that make the whole process, from before the coup to the present and beyond, a very complicated series of events.

Pedro

This whole starting Pedro Martinez over Cole Hamels because of Pedro's history with the Yankees despite the fact that Hamels is hugely better than Pedro at this point thing had better work out. Trend can speak to Charlie Manuel's managing ability better than I, but this screams of the worst kind of managerial hunch that is completely unsupported by evidence.

I mean, the only thing on the line is the defeat of the universe's center of evil...

Historical Image of the Day

Oil drilling crew, Texas, 1931

Where Things Are Made

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka writes a good op-ed talking about why it matters where things are made.

When I first saw this piece, I feared it would be a piece of quasi-nativist feeling that we not infrequently have seen from labor, arguing that things should be made in America because we are Americans and because our jobs matter more than people in Mexico or China.

But Trumka wisely avoids that pitfall and discusses why it really does matter where things are made--because it's really hard to create a functioning economy when you don't have manufacturing jobs. I totally agree with this. We are in this recession/depression. How to get out of it? Where are the jobs? We have literally torn down the infrastructure we used to have for this kind of work. We have devalued it in our culture and instead created jobs in the service industry and based around endless consumption. If that's no longer a way to build an economy (and frankly, it never was), where do people work?

Trumka notes that the American economy more closely resembles that of Monaco every day. It's an apt comparison in a nation that has tried to live a luxurious lifestyle based upon conspicious consumption, but the crash from this is hard and likely to keep getting harder. Trumka also notes that for all the discussion of a new green economy:

For example, the rest of the world leads in mass transit technology and the U.S. is home to only two of the 10 largest solar photovoltaic producers, one of the top 10 advanced battery manufacturers and two of the top 10 wind turbine producers. If we want to be world leaders in clean technology and have transportation systems to match then we must think strategically and at scale.

Precisely. Isn't actually putting people to work in this green economy the important part of the latter word in the phrase? Don't we have to create a robust economy for the green economy to be effective? We have exported manufacturing and all the positives and negatives that go along with it. We don't want to see the pollution our goods cause and we don't want to pay people living wages. But without that, the benefits of the green economy are going to go to other nations and the American working class will continue to suffer.

Obama Increasingly Involved in Honduras

Luis Vertiz notes that the Obama Administration is beginning to get more involved in Honduras. Obama is sending high-level negoitators to Honduras to try and work through the crisis, hoping to succeed where Costa Rican Oscar Arias failed.

A certain section of the left romanticizes revolution in Latin America and wants to turn every current conflict into a Cold War showdown between the good revolutionaries and the bad U.S. After the coup took place this summer, some of these people were screaming for the U.S. to stay out, etc. And the U.S. did play a backseat role for quite awhile. This was good. Outside of Micheletti and the coup leaders, as well as Jim DeMint and other wingnuts in Congress, there aren't responsible voices who think the U.S. has played an imperialistic role in Honduras. Certainly I'd have trouble arguing that it's not time for the U.S. to get involved, particularly as the coup leaders move toward more repressive measures to hold on to power.

Bad Days in American History: October 28. 1919

On this date in 1919, the United States officially went insane. That day marked Congress' overriding of President Woodrow Wilson's veto of the Volstead Act, for all intents and purposes banning the consumption of alcohol in this nation.

It's hard to stress how loathsome the temperance movement was. While it's true that early Americans were extreme drunks (as demonstrated amply in W. J. Rorabough's The Alcoholic Republic), the temperance movement moved beyond reforming extreme behavior and into a moral crusade that saw alcohol use as an overarching explanation for everything wrong with America. That included immigration and there were many connections between the temperance movement and the anti-immigration movement that succeeded in closing America's gates to most immigrants by 1924.

Now, one might think that Wilson vetoing the Volstead Act reflects well upon him, but he certainly didn't veto it out of principle. Rather, it was on technical matters concerning its relationship to wartime prohibition. Wilson had supported prohibition as part of the New Freedom when he was elected in 1912. As I was researching this, I was hoping to finally find something worthwhile about Woodrow Wilson; alas, I was again foiled in this quest.

The Volstead Act also demonstrated the worst characteristics of Americans: nativist, puritanical, simple-minded, insular. We became the laughing stock of much of the world (though in fact we were not the only nation to attempt banning alcohol during these years). Of course, prohibition had massive unintended consequences that its priggish supporters neither anticipated nor had any answer for. It made drinking cool again for the first time in decades. It created a massive surge in crime. It led to a huge black market. Police corruption became an epidemic as guys who didn't want to enforce the law found it really easy not to do so. Politicians and other societal leaders rather openly ignored it. Prohibitionists' reaction was simply to demand greater enforcement and tell everyone to go to church.

Prohibition played a major role in the standardization of bad beer in this country. I am just beginning research on a book length project on beer and local breweries in America and I understand that up until Prohibition, local breweries around the nation made a wide variety of sometimes very high quality beer. I hear the original recipe for Coors produces a quite delicious beer, though I have not had it. But after years of not drinking beer, the public had largely lost its taste for complex beers by 1933 and in order to survive, the breweries who managed to reopen after fourteen years found it in their interests to produce weak lagers that appealed to wider audience. I need to research this phenomenon in significantly more detail, but if we have the Volstead Act to blame for Miller Lite and Keystone, I am going to be even more full of rage than I already am.

Of course, the Volstead Act is hardly the only time the nation has decided to criminalize a drug for less than rational reasons. Many of the Volstead Act's less savory elements have contributed to the current War on Drugs. Combine this with a far more advanced police state than we had 90 years ago and you see the elimination of the 4th Amendment from providing any real protections for people, a skyrocketing prison population, and the forcing of perfectly decent people into lives of poverty and stigma because of harmless crimes.

All in all, I wonder if October 28, 1919 isn't one of the very worst days in American history. I know it's not quite on the same level as FDR's executive order placing Japanese- Americans in concentration camps or the founding of the KKK, or the election of George W. Bush, but it's pretty nightmarish. A social and political disaster, it reeked of the most disturbing and close-minded trends in American life that we still have to fight today.

Historical Image of the Day

Exxon Valdez oil spill, Alaska, 1989

"I don't fear death, I fear political silence"

I don't even have much to say about this: Malalai Joya is 31. A year an a half-ish older than I am. She's already been a delegate to the Afghan Loya Jirga, the convention that wrote the post-invasion constitution, been elected to her country's parliament, and escaped five assassination attempts.

She's friggin' amazing.

Watch it.

Shocking

Joe Lieberman's desire to prove he's an absolutely awful, despicable piece of shit knows no bounds. Maybe this will finally be the move that leads to Harry Reid stripping Revoltin' Joe from all of his leadership positions and his role in the caucus, but I know better than to get my hopes up.

Honduras and Colombian Paramilitaries

I thought Trend might have talked about this, but I can't find it if he did, so I'll mention it.

Reed Kurtz has an excellent piece up on how the Honduran elites are hiring Colombian paramilitaries to fight for their side in the coup. This is disturbing on multiple levels. As Kurtz notes, "

Supposedly "demobilized" in 2006, the AUC [the Colombian paramilitary organization] has largely continued to carry out its drug-dealing activities and campaign of violence and intimidation against campesinos, indigenous peoples, stigmatized social groups such as homosexuals and prostitutes, labor organizers, critical journalists, and human rights advocates."

Now Honduras is importing this to their nation. Kurtz notes how Micheletti and the coup leaders are also importing the guilt by association used by the AUC to taint Zelaya:

The right's problem with Zelaya has never been that he tried to reform his country's deeply flawed constitution ("the worst in the world," according to Costa Rican President Óscar Arias), but because, according to Micheletti himself, he "became friends with Daniel Ortega, Chávez, Correa, Evo Morales. ... He went to the left." In other words, Micheletti is using the same tactics of "guilt by association" that his AUC allies use to justify their violence, only this time the "guilt" consists of association with other popular, democratically elected heads of state in the region. Nevertheless, the message and the effect are still the same: If you oppose us, and what we stand for, we will take you down with force.

It's all quite disturbing. Kurtz closes on an optimistic note, claiming:

But whereas the reactionary elites in the region are disposed to using violence, intimidation, and the contracting of paramilitaries to impose their will, those on the Latin American left, the people for whom Morales, Chávez, and Zelaya are merely elected representatives, have increasingly turned to strategies of nonviolence, popular organization, and civil resistance in their struggles for justice and democracy. The degree to which the popular left—and its leaders—continue to adhere to the values of peace, justice, and solidarity will ultimately decide whether or not the popular movement achieves its goals, not only here and now in Honduras, but in all of Latin America.

I'm not entirely convinced of this. I'm hardly romanticizing revolutionary violence, but it's unclear the extent to which nonviolence works in the face of forces who absolutely do not care about worldwide public opinion, sanctions, or other forms of rebuke except military invasion which is obviously not going to happen in Honduras. There may be cases where violent resistance makes more sense. I'm not saying that Honduras has reached that point yet, but the importation of the AUC makes me increasingly pessimistic.

Steve Phillips

So I really don't care who sleeps with who in the world. I certainly don't much care about a jerkish baseball announcer. But the case of Steve Phillips really bugs me because his sheer existence in the broadcasting world has irked me for years.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story, Phillips, one of ESPN's leading baseball announcers, was fired this week for sleeping with a young staffer.

OK, well, I certainly don't like people in power sleeping with people they have power over. This is why I find teacher-student romantic relationships so revolting. But what did ESPN expect? Phillips has a history of sexual harassment that stretches back over a decade. He oozes slime when on the screen.

Moreover, Phillips bugs me because the only reason he got a broadcasting job is because he was general manager of the New York Mets. Was he the GM of the Royals or Brewers or Pirates, he wouldn't be seen within 10 miles of a TV screen. This bothers me on multiple levels. First, the hiring of ex-jock sports announcers these days is predicated entirely on a perception of market share. It has little to do with quality and everything to do with their fame during playing years. This creates scenarios where absurdly unqualified people like Emmitt Smith get high profile jobs. Meanwhile, any number of brilliant but lesser known players are never considered for this position. To their credit, ESPN has one recent hire like this, Orestes Destrade, who was an extremely marginal first baseman in his day. He was probably hired to appeal to Latino audiences, but that's fine. Playing days fame has always mattered for these hires, but never so much as the present. People like Dave Campbell, Steve Jones, Harold Reynolds, and even Cris Collinsworth had marginal national fame during their playing careers. Collinsworth was excellent, but played in Cincinnati, meaning he would never get considered today.

Plus, who actually tunes into a game because they liked one of the announcers when he played 10 years ago? Does anyone really watch sports for this reason? Oh, I have to know what Keyshawn Johnson (arguably the most overrated football player of the last 20 years) has to say about the game? Meanwhile, the superb Tom Jackson, a good but not star linebacker from the Broncos teams of the 80s, gets increasingly marginalized because he wasn't a #1 overall pick and general pain in the ass for a decade.

The other problem with Phillips' lack of qualifications for the position to begin with is that he was completely incompetent as a general manager. He got fired for making such brilliant moves as trading a young Scott Kazmir to the Rays for the legendary Victor Zambrano. Phillips was a horrible GM and therefore I have no ability to respect anything he says about players.

Oddly, I consider the case of Matt Millen totally differently. Millen of course is probably the single worst general manager in the history of the NFL. He turned the Detroit Lions, already a bad franchise, into a national joke and kept his job for years because the Lions' owner thought Millen was a good Christian. Now Millen is in the booth and it's hard to hear him talk without snickering. The difference between him and Phillips though is that Millen was a great announcer before he took the GM job; had he remained in the booth, he and not Collinsworth would almost certainly have replaced John Madden on Sunday Night Football this fall. He has amazing insight and great presence. He just can't run a team. Phillips was not good in the booth or as a GM. He was just a super tanned guy from New York.

Of course, it's unlikely that ESPN will pick a decent 3rd guy to join the Jon Miller/Joe Morgan Sunday Night Baseball team. Phillips was put in there as a way to mitigate Morgan's idiocy and assholeishness in the first place. The other guy considered for the job was the loathsome Rick Sutcliffe, a sexist bastard. Meanwhile, high quality guys like Orel Hershisher or Dave Campbell will continue to receive second-rate assignments. Hershisher is at least famous and it's surprising he hasn't been bumped up; perhaps he is too good and would embarrass Morgan. Campbell was a crappy second baseman and although one of the best color men of his generation, will never get that top spot.

Pro-Capitalist Propaganda, circa 1948

This is absolutely fantastic. Very much worth your 9 minutes. I love Cold War propaganda. There's an excellent set of Soviet animated propaganda on DVD. It's out there in part because people see it as so quaint today that there's a market for it. This is just as bizarre. Really there's little difference except that the artistic merit of the capitalist propaganda is less than the communist stuff.

Via Sociological Images

Obama Allowing Wreath To Be Laid On Arlington Confederate Monument

Ed Sebesta's tireless work in fighting neo-Confederate movements in the U.S. has no end. He is currently working to get Obama to stop the federal government from sending a yearly wreath to honor the Confederate dead at their monument in the Arlington National Cemetery. Obama of course ignored his letter. In fact, this is precisely the kind of cultural issue Obama avoids at all costs, even though it honors people who fought to keep his people in slavery.

This is a worthy cause and I highly recommend informing yourself about it.

Baby Einstein Doesn't Work?

You mean that if I plop my child in front of a TV with all the right videos, they won't turn into Albert Einstein? I'm shocked. You mean I actually have to parent and spend time with the kid? I can't believe that! I was sure that if I just played Mozart to them, they would turn into brilliant scientists!!!!

Note 1: This is a prime example of how we fetishize technology as the solution to all our problems.

Note 2: If you don't have time to actually teach your children, maybe you shouldn't be having children, though of course, things happen.

Note 3: The whole idea of Baby Mozart and Baby Beethoven and all of that is deeply offensive because it turns classical music into background music that supposedly makes you smarter, but really is something no one wants to think about.

Note 4: Just because your child doesn't turn out to be a genius, you know that's OK. If they are plumbers or secretaries or cooks or whatever, they are still really valuable people so long as they treat the people around them with love and kindness.

Note 5: Even though these videos are totally worthless, they are also racist. They all promote European culture as the be all and end all. Where's Baby Lao Tzu? Baby Kurosawa? Baby Mandela? Baby Frida? Actually, I'd totally buy Baby Frida. The weirdness of that is fun to contemplate.

Historical Image of the Day

Oil wells, Summerland, California, 1915

Brazil to Establish a Truth Commission for Its Dictatorship Period (1964-1985)

Well, this is interesting news:

Twenty four years after the military left power in Brazil, the government is to create a Truth Commission to investigate crimes committed by the security forces between 1964 and 1985.

Brazil is the only country in Latin America which has not investigated deaths, disappearances and torture which took place during its dictatorship, or put alleged perpetrators on trial.

Anytime a Truth Commission is established, it's good news for multiple reasons: it forces governments and societies to recognize the horrible crimes some sectors have committed (and many more supported, tacitly or explicitly); it frequently allows closure for victims' families who still don't know the fate of their loved ones; and the sheer act of a truth commission hopefully deters such actions from future governments (though it's in no way guaranteed).

I'd like to say what all can emerge from this, but I really have no idea right now. It's not like the country, human rights organizers, or historians are going to be incredibly shocked by the techniques of torture and of murder by state agents - those accounts have been well-known and well-detailed both through non-state-sponsored commissions like the "Nunca Mais" ("Never Again") project, as well as testimonials of many others who were tortured. As for the disappearances and murders, it's true that sometimes details are missing, as in the case of the Araguaia guerrilla war in the early-1970s, when the military killed and buried dozens-to-hundreds of guerrillas challenging the dictatorship.

Additionally, I really do hope the military archives are opened up. The military's line that the archives were burnt and destroyed years ago and don't even exist rings hollow for a number of reasons. First, the military's stance on this has shifted throughout time; first, it said the archives didn't exist anymore, then that they never existed at all, then that they were did, but were closed, and then that they were destroyed. I suppose this is possible, but I find it unlikely. Additionally, I fail to see how some central components of the military security apparatus remain in archives like the Department of Public Order and Security (DOPS) archives in places like Rio and Sao Paulo, as well as the Division of Security and Information (DSI) archive at the National Archive, both of which I've had experience with. While the security apparati in Brazil were varying and multiple, they all ran through at least some branch of the military, so I fail to see how the DSI and DOPS collections could survive and make it into archives, yet the "military archives" have been destroyed. Plus, if my research experience showed anything in general terms, its that the "banality of evil" and the desire to document everything, no matter how incriminating, is a frequent feature (not a bug) of authoritarian regimes.

That said, I also suspect this can only illuminate so much. Even if the commission reveals the general whereabouts of the bodies of the victims of the Araguaian war, for example, it was in one of the most forbidding and rapidly shifting environmental areas in Brazil, and tracking down the bodies' remains could be difficult (though the fact that some remains have been found is somewhat encouraging).

I hate to end on a pessimistic note, so I'll make it the penultimate point. One of the people quoted in the article points out that state agents still actively practice torture in prisons and against the poor, and he's absolutely right. However, I don't have much hope that a Truth Commission into the dictatorship period in Brazil will lead to an end to current practices of torture. Torture and "alternate" rights for the poor and marginalized in Brazil have existed since slavery; the poor and the rich/darker and lighter have always had alternate sources of justice, prisons, etc. Torturing the poor and marginalized has been a part of the landscape of Brazilian "law" since the late-1800s, and I just don't see why a commission studying just 21 years would suddenly lead everybody to support an end to torture today. Again, it's not like the practice and methods of torture in the dictatorship are some secret - most people in Brazil (and those studying the dictatorship) are familiar with the "parrot's perch," the "dragon chair," and other torture mechanisms. If society has known about these for more than 30 years, I really don't see how a truth commission will suddenly lead to an "awakening." I hope I'm wrong, but I just don't see it.

That said, the fact that the government and state apparatuses themselves are finally forcing themselves to deal with this dark period in Brazil's history is nothing but good news. Again, scholars and others have known much of this for decades, but new details are always valuable to historians and human rights activists, and especially to the victims' families, and the fact that the government is finally willing to confront its past is an important step, even if it is symbolic. If nothing else, Brazil's governments and state owe this to the families who lost loved ones in their struggles against a repressive, authoritarian regime.

Historical Image of the Day

This week's images will focus on the history of the oil industry.

Oil workers in Louisiana. No date, but probably the 1920s.

Understanding the Complexities of the Drug Trade in Rio's Favelas

Randy points us to this article in The Economist. The article does a great job explaining succinctly why A) there appears to be so much violence in Rio, and B) why it's in the favelas, and not a city-wide event:

"A further reason for Rio’s spectacular violence is that it has three large, competing drug factions, whereas in other big cities (including the largest, São Paulo) one gang is dominant. A recent study from Rio de Janeiro state’s government on the economics of the local drug business suggests that, because of this competition, far from living like characters in an MTV hip-hop video, Rio’s dealers are operating at “close to break-even”.

Using a conservative estimate for total annual drugs sales in the city, of R$316m ($182m), the study reckons that after buying the product from wholesalers, employing a sales force and investing in capital (guns, mainly), Rio’s dealers make combined annual profits of R$27m ($15m). The wage structure within the factions appears to be surprisingly flat, far more so than in the American gang analysed in 2000 by two academics, Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh. Rio’s dealers seem to be an exception to Brazil’s national picture of unequal income distribution."

It's a quick run-down, and does a good job distributing the blame. While many uninformed non-Brazilians, many racist/classist (no matter how much they deny it) Brazilians, and foreign media reports place the blame solely on the drug gangs (and the favelados more generally), the economist reminds us that there's a long legacy miscues (to put it euphemistically) from other groups as well, including governmental policy-making:

Past mistakes include making accommodations with drug-dealing factions in the hope of keeping them peaceful. Rio’s police force is also part of the problem. Some of the weapons used by drug dealers are sold to them by the police, and officers still execute too many people on the spot rather than bother with prosecuting suspects, making favela-dwellers regard them as no more a source of justice than the drugs gangs.

The article also mentions the existence of militias in the favelas and around them, though it doesn't mention that these militias are often composed of former and current members of the police. Nonetheless, the (brief) article is the first I've seen in the foreign press that really understands the complexities of the violence and drug economy in Brazil. These complexities are why last week's violence was not initially an attack on police forces in Rio (as many headlines and reports tacitly or explictly framed it), and are why the Olympics are not in any grave danger from these types of incidents. And if the media, both in Brazil and abroad, would take better care to understand and report on these complexities, then maybe bringing an end to the violence could be a more realistic possibility than it is when media reports simply frame the city as a place of extreme violence and treats all the urban poor and favelados as criminals. Maybe then, images like the one above will become more uncommon.

Grayson

I have a real hard time not loving Alan Grayson. I know the left is supposed to be into civil discourse and all that, but we've been hurt for a long time by not being willing to punch back at Republican filth. Florida congressman Alan Grayson has no such problem.

On Hardball, Grayson had this to say about Dick Cheney:

"Well, my response is -- and by the way, I have trouble listening to what he says sometimes, because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he's talking," said Grayson. "But my response is this: He's just angry because the president doesn't shoot old men in the face. But by the way, when he was done speaking, did he just then turn into a bat and fly away?"

Ha. I love it!

Facial Hair of the Weekend

Casey Blake may still have the best beard in baseball, but as the Philadelphia Phillies return to the World Series, I give you Phillie pitcher Chan Ho Park and his beard.

Soupy Sales, RIP

His career here.

As a remembrance, everyone should smash a pie in the face of someone they love.

Germany Is Not The United States

Some countries are different than the United States:

A group of rich Germans has launched a petition calling for the government to make wealthy people pay higher taxes.

The group say they have more money than they need, and the extra revenue could fund economic and social programmes to aid Germany's economic recovery.

The man behind the petition, Dieter Lehmkuhl, told Berlin's Tagesspiegel that there were 2.2 million people in Germany with a fortune of more than 500,000 euros.

If they all paid the tax for two years, Germany could raise 100bn euros to fund ecological programmes, education and social projects, said the retired doctor and heir to a brewery.

Signatory Peter Vollmer told AFP news agency he was supporting the proposal because he had inherited "a lot of money I do not need".

He said the tax would be "a viable and socially acceptable way out of the flagrant budget crisis".

While this idea has not exactly caught fire in Germany, can one even imagine such a movement in the United States, a nation which sees taxes as evil and yet demands the state to do any number of expensive things for the people? What would the right-wing bloviators say!

Bad Days in American History: October 22, 1962

47 years ago today, the Cuban Missile Crisis began. Specifically, Kennedy gave his public warning to the USSR and Cuba on this date in 1962.

It's amazing not only how close the world came to nuclear war, but how absolutely blinded by Cold War rhetoric the Kennedy administration was. That the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed that attack and invasion was the only solution to the problem is mindblowing. I know that the Cold War seems like a long time ago and the choices people had to make at that time very different from the present, but that no other option was seriously on the table, even though Cuba and the USSR hadn't actually attacked the United States boggles my mind.

I mean when Robert McNamara is the person on your foreign policy making sense, as he believed the 40 missiles in Cuba didn't change the equation between the US and USSR that much, you know everyone else is totally insane. And McNamara possibly deserves more credit than anyone during the missile crisis. He kind of blew that capital though.

Of course, the United States hardly deserves all the blame for the situation. The Soviets way overplayed their hand (as Khruschev knew). And Castro's willingness to allow his nation to be completely destroyed in the name of ideology is completely insane. Increasingly, I think the 20th century will be known as the century of ideology, which will not be a complement. Whether capitalism, communism, or fascism, people in the 20th century were willing to do things that were completely insane in the service of ideologies they believed explained all the world's problems and would lead their nation's people to glory. All one can do is shake their heads. I wonder if Bush-style neoconservatism and extremist capitalism isn't the last ideology. Maybe not, but is there really much difference between Cheney and Castro or Mussolini when it comes to how they see the world?

In any case, at least cooler heads prevailed in the fall of 1962, but the situation hardly speaks well of Kennedy's foreign policy or the state of the world at that time.

The Day Parody Died

If you were ever skeptical that Fox "News" misrepresents little details like "facts" and "information," your skepticism just suffered a major blow:

On August 18, 2000, journalist Jane Akre won $425,000 in a court ruling where she charged she was pressured by Fox News management and lawyers to air what she knew and documented to be false information.

The real information: she found out cows in Florida were being injected with RBGH, a drug designed to make cows produce milk – and, according to FDA-redacted studies, unintentionally designed to make human beings produce cancer.

Fox lawyers, under pressure by the Monsanto Corporation (who produced RBGH), rewrote her report over 80 times to make it compatible with the company’s requests. She and her husband, journalist Steve Wilson, refused to air the edited segment.

In February 2003, Fox appealed the decision and an appellate court and had it overturned. Fox lawyers argued it was their first amendment right to report false information. In a six-page written decision, the Court of Appeals decided the FCC’s position against news distortion is only a “policy,” not a “law, rule, or regulation.”

That's right - a court ruled that Fox "News" could continue "reporting" false information. Not "alternately interpreted" information. Not information up for debate. Pure, straight-up false information. As "news."

I'd comment more, but there's little more to be said. There is no depth deep enough, no bottom low enough, that Fox "News" won't sink to.

Blame Where Blame Belongs

This piece rightfully blames the Senate for not extending unemployment benefits. But the lead suggests that the blame falls on both parties:

One month after the House passed a bill extending unemployment benefits, the issue is still being debated in the Senate. While leaders in both parties are trying to negotiate a compromise, the bickering is costing people their benefits.

No, let's be quite clear on this: the Republican Party has decided to not let this past. While Harry Reid deserves excoriation for his weakness as Majority Leader, there is only one party who is denying people benefits. That is the Republican Party.

Is it asking too much for journalists to assign blame when one party is at fault? Or can they only do that when they can blame Democrats?

What We're In For

If Erik's post below makes me laugh at its veracity, this makes me want to slit my wrists, eat a shotgun, and hang myself, all in one swift cloud of death.

One of my favorite things is when people say that backlash against Jeter is "irrational." He's a hall-of-famer who's been a great hitter and a middling-to-terrible fielder. "Clutch" is the most overrated bullshit laziness ever, and the McCarver (and New York media) tongue-baths are enough to create a backlash.

But this? The Yankees haven't even even won the ALCS yet, and we're already being exposed to "unforgettable photos of Jeter off the field"? Not for any other player ever, but for Jeter before the Yankees even get to the World Series?

Hey - Sports Illustrated!!!!!

FUCK. YOU.

The Worse Article to Ever Hit the Intertubes

That Creed is a great band.

Published in Slate no less.

If people can publish this shit at major websites, how can I not make my living on the internet? Are my ideas actually worse than this?!

Via Lemieux.

The Inevitably of a New Yankees Dynasty

So I have this theory.

Every four years God and Satan have a meeting. They agree that there can only be some much good and so much evil in the world. It's a very yin-yang thing. But they have to decide how to split it up. So they consider the twin institutional towers of evil--the Republican Party and the New York Yankees. They chat, have a few beers, and figure out who will have what for the next four years. Because when Republicans are in power, the Yankees rarely do well. And when the Democrats control the presidency, Yankee dynasties almost always take place.

The Yankees have won 26 championships. Of those, 19 came in Democratic administrations. The Yankees dominated during the Roosevelt years. They were still great under Truman. They were excellent under Kennedy. They were bad for part of the 70s, but as soon as Carter took over, a new dynasty began. That ended when Reagan came to power, but the Clinton years were hell on Yankee haters. And now, after 8 years when Yankee evil was waning, it has come back with a vengeance under Obama.

Of the 7 Republican titles, 3 came under Eisenhower, which just goes to show that he wasn't a real Republican to begin with. The other four came in the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover years, when they were just another team and before their real evil was made known to the world

The real exception to this rule in Lyndon Johnson. The Yankees did not win a World Series in the Johnson years. I think this goes to show just what a great president Johnson was. The Great Society and Yankee sucking. How can one beat that? Moreover, this totally makes up for Vietnam.

That leads to another question--is the sacrifice of 58,000 Americans worth a bad Yankee team?

The answer is obviously yes.

Many societies have understood this phenomenon in one form or another. We think it's a big political question, wasting the lives of our young men, blah blah blah. Other peoples would call it sacrificing to the gods. The Aztecs clearly understood this, plus they were smart enough to capture people to sacrifice. Other societies have thrown young virgins into volcanoes. We fight pointless wars in horrible places. It really doesn't matter. It's satiating the gods desire for blood. Johnson's genius was understanding this and acting upon it. And Bush, as a former baseball owner himself, also understood it. After all, this theory is at least a good a justification for Iraq as the nonsense the administration actually offered.

Now Obama comes around, God and Satan have their meeting, good and evil realign and the Yankees begin winning again. I know we might get better healthcare out of it, but what's a little premature death in the face of seeing Derek Jeter get another ring? Obviously, the sacrifice is worth it.

So now I have to sit and watch the rest of the baseball playoffs, knowing that the Yankees will inevitably win. It makes me sad, though I would be happier if I placed large sums of money on the outcome like I should, since I have the secret.

Instead, I just have one thing to say: Palin/Bachmann '12! Do it to fight evil, do it for America!

Anti-Immigration Fanatics Using Environmental Arguments

The environmental movement has a long history of using anti-immigration arguments to push their agenda. This goes back to the late 19th century. The historical connection between the two movements has never entirely disappeared. A group called Californians for Population Stabilization is launching ads claiming that reduced immigration "will save the Earth."

This is ridiculous on its face. Any environmentalist knows that nature doesn't respect national boundaries. Keeping people in Mexico isn't going to keep environmental problems out of the U.S. Not to mention the fact that the real root of many environmental problems is massive consumption by the world's rich, not overpopulation. But these anti-immigrant racists don't care about facts; rather, they are just marshaling whatever they can to push their agenda of hate.

A Quick Question

Dear C.C. Sabathia:

Where in the blue hell was this back in 2007, in either game? That's some outstanding timing you have.

Thanks for nothing, jerk.

Trend

Just a Reminder...

...that Silvio Berlusconi is one of the most arrogant leaders in the world.

Uruguay's Amnesty for Dictatorship Struck Down

Most of the Southern Cone (Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay) countries, and even Brazil, have dealt with amnesties that forgave the culprits guilty of state-sponsored murder in one way or another. Chile managed to assure that Pinochet would never see an end to legal processes before he died; Argentina has begun prosecuting torturers and murderers from its "Dirty War," and has arrested leaders like Jorge Videla; Paraguay has literally begun digging up its past, and has some of the most extensive open archives on collaboration between right-wing dictatorships in South America; even Brazil has opened some secret archives, and while failing to ever go after torturers or the presidents, has stripped doctors who oversaw torture of their medical licenses.

The one conspicuous absence here is Uruguay, which still had in place a special amnesty for anybody who'd committed crimes during the dictatorship. Until today, when a court threw out the amnesty:

The Supreme Court ruling only applies to the investigation into the 1974 death in a military barrack of a young Communist teacher Nibia Sabasagaray, allegedly as a consequence of tortures and other abuses suffered while under arrest.

While that doesn't sound very hopeful save for the one case it deals with, the legal ruling for this case is based on the fact that the amnesty was not approved with a special majority vote, a requirement for this type of law in Uruguay, as well as the fact it violates the autonomy of the branches of government. As a result, while the court's ruling deals only with one case, its legal basis renders the entire amnesty illegal, opening the removal of amnesty to additional cases. On top of this, in the presidential elections this Sunday, Uruguayans also have a chance to vote on a referendum that would annul the amnesty law that Congress approved in 1986 (and that a referendum in 1989 confirmed).

In short, the one remaining amnesty law in the Southern Cone that had been relatively untouched and unchallenged is suddenly facing assaults from all sides, and this is nothing but good news for those interested in seeking justice for the crimes of Uruguay's military governments between 1974 and 1985.