The Largest Minority

May 18th, 2008 by Manila Ryce

I’m a day late, but it’s important to celebrate the third anniversary of MP George Galloway giving US lawmakers a much-needed ass kicking. Galloway is a real anti-war hero and proponent for human rights. He not only spoke up when it was politically inconvenient, but went head first into the belly of the beast to do so directly to the US Senate. Fearless public figures like him are responsible for real change (not meaningless Obama-esque “change” that looks nice on a bumper sticker). For the first 6:30 minutes Galloway’s blood is brought to a slow boil. Enjoy the magic once they finally allow him to speak.

April 15th, 2008 by Manila Ryce

Unlike two cowardly former American presidential candidates, leftist Mexican candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador refused to accept the results of a stolen presidential election in his country in 2006. There have been two separate governments in Mexico ever since.

Last week, the legitimate leftist government of Mexico stormed both chambers of Congress to protest a bill pushed through by illegitimate President Felipe Calderon, which would open Mexico’s national oil company to privatization. Mexico’s oil industry was nationalized in 1938, but now Calderon wants to allow US corporations in. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador drew a line in the sand, saying Mexico was not for sale and that the opposition government would not allow the privatization.

Since last week, leftist deputies and senators have been camped out on the floors of both upper and lower houses of Congress. Calling off a brief hunger strike, the protesters rejected a proposal by members of President Felipe Calderon’s National Action Party and the Institutional Revolutionary Party to debate the privatization for 50 days followed by a vote in an extraordinary session. They instead demanded that a wide open national debate take place. Why, that crazy idea almost sounds like democracy.

Mexico is the fifth largest producer of oil, a resource which constitutes 40% of the nation’s federal budget. The US-backed bill to privatize Mexico’s oil industry will threaten the country’s sovereignty even further, but that is hardly of concern to Mexico’s corrupt politicians who are amongst the highest paid in the world and immune from criminal prosecution.

Rather than give a brief mention to the two conflicting governments in Mexico and the building potential for a revolution, American corporate media channels like CNN have instead decided to play reruns of Obama’s pastor. Oh, that guy sure is scary America. Know what’s even scarier? All of Mexico is plotting ways to leave their country and steal your job, and that’s all you need to know about the country.

February 25th, 2008 by J. Milton

Nine months ago, I traveled to Beijing with my wife for a genetics conference. It was my first time outside of North America, and although I studied Chinese culture extensively during my undergraduate years, I still found it difficult not to take some of the Western propaganda baggage along with me. Over my two-week stay, and limited travel to anything other than tourist traps, I found the experience to be a mixed-bag. Beijing is a lot like Washington, D.C. With dozens of historical monuments paying homage to past leaders, the city draws Chinese tourists from all over the country every day. It’s polluted, visible poverty is rampant, and it can be treacherous to navigate as a foreigner. Again, not unlike our own D.C. But there’s one key difference. When I visited D.C. about 20 years ago (I was a little squirt), I remember looking through our tour bus window at some protest near the capitol steps. There were chants, singing, shouting and picket signs a-plenty. And it was all considered business-as-usual to the on-lookers. In fact, this right to protest is considered part and parcel of our American democratic process. Not so in China. The last mass protest in Beijing was on June 4th, 1989 at Tiananmen Square where the government responded with military action leaving over 1000 civilians dead. Suffice to say, I saw no protests as I toured downtown Beijing.

Back in my hotel room, the mass media was much the same. Picture 100 cable channels with Chinese versions of everything we have in the States. Chinese MTV, Chinese Discovery Channel, Chinese Ren & Stimpy, and so on. Except for news. Every single news channel was essentially a Chinese version of Fox News. It was crazy! And don’t get me started on the internet. Every web search was filtered and any content that was not government-approved was blocked. When I got back home to the States, I remember making The Largest Minority the first website I visited. It was my way of celebrating my return, knowing that my visit to the site would be unfiltered and unrestricted. You see, in my mind, criticism of your government is not just a right, but it’s a necessary form of participation. Democracy simply does not work without protest.

Over the last decade, in the aftermath of 9/11, Americans seem to be forgetting this. Protest and criticism of the government is increasingly being considered un-patriotic. As a result, we’ve watched many of our basic freedoms slowly eroded. Privacy and due process have been hacked and slashed through the Patriot Act, but only recently has freedom of speech been so directly assaulted.

From the Global Integrity Commons article:

“Tuesday, February 19, 2008
U.S. Court Order Shuts Down Wikileaks.org

Incredibly, Wikileaks.org, an organization devoted to exposing corruption, has been muzzled by a U.S. court order (pdf download). Rather than attack a specific finding or document, the court has ordered their DNS registrar to essentially erase the organization’s website from the Web. While wikileaks.org is down, their site can be found via IP addess: http://88.80.13.160, which is hosted in Sweden.

The order comes at the request of a Swiss bank, Bank Julius Baer, and its Cayman Islands subsidiary who had been implicated in allegedly laundering money by documents posted on wikileaks.org. A recap of Wikileaks coverage of Bank Julius Baer is mirrored here.

I have had several conversations via email with people at Wikileaks as they worked to get their organization started up. I have been deeply impressed with the quality of their early work, and am genuinely shocked at this shutdown order. The U.S. joins China and Thailand in censoring the wikileaks.org website.

From the beginning, the Wikileaks folks have been expecting this kind of reaction all along, and have put serious thought into how to evade this kind of treatment. I thought they were being conspiratorial. I was wrong. I am confident that this will not slow them or their mission. ”

When I read stuff like this, I wonder how far from the brink we really are as a country. How many more Rupert Murdoch-owned news outlets do we need? How many more websites need to be erased?

February 20th, 2008 by Manila Ryce

This excerpt was taken from the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, an independent research and information organization. Click here or on the link below to read the full article, which is informative and non-partisan.

With yesterday’s news that President Castro is immediately stepping down from his office and will not be a candidate to succeed himself, the Bush administration has not eased up on its contentions that the Cuban elections are rigged by the Cuban Communist Party and that Cubans do not elect their own representatives in an entirely open manner. Despite these claims, party officials and many ordinary Cubans remind their critics that the Constitution of the Republic of Cuba in 1992 declares that “all citizens, with the legal capacity to do so, have the right to take part in the leadership of the state. This can be either manifested directly or through their elected representatives” in the chambers of the “People’s Power, and to participate as prescribed by law in the periodic elections and people’s referendums through free, equal and secret vote.”

As the U.S. and Cuba have exhibited dramatically conflicting beliefs about the authenticity of the island’s democratic electoral system, who is the American public to believe? Do Cubans actually only cast votes on pro-communist ballots? Are the Cuban elections legitimate? Why is the Cuban Communist Party the only legal party on the island?

As Americans see themselves as citizens of a free, democratic country, which tolerates diverse and distinct political views, they must understand the relatively exotic nature of Cuba’s electoral system, the skewed perspective of many of its citizens, and the fundamentally unique nature of its history before any evaluation regarding the legitimacy of Cuban elections can begin. We must first start by analyzing the electoral system that Fidel Castro has left for Cuba.

read more…

February 20th, 2008 by Manila Ryce

The border fence isn’t just an insanely stupid idea to solve a perceived “problem” to our national security and economy. It also comes with the added bonus of destroying the environment and violating the land rights of indigenous tribes and other peoples too. Xenophobia comes with a heavy price tag.

However, what’s just as interesting as the people who are getting screwed over by this waste of time and money are the ones which aren’t.

January 22nd, 2008 by Manila Ryce

In a word, yes.

Michael Ratner is an attorney who has represented Gitmo prisoners, is an adjunct professor of law at Columbia University Law School, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and a co-host of Pacifica radio show Law and Disorder. Much like the rest of us, Ratner is simply shocked that Canada would so publicly bend over for the United States when the entire world knows we engage in torture. Amnesty International has also criticized Canada for taking the US and Israel off the list for purely political reasons. The Canadian role of lap dog was made painfully clear when Canadian foreign minister Maxime Bernier shamelessly apologized with his tail between his legs, saying the list “wrongly includes some of our closest allies. I have directed that the manual be reviewed and rewritten.”

January 21st, 2008 by Manila Ryce

Sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967.

“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
- Dante

January 4th, 2008 by Manila Ryce

Since diversity is the lifeblood of any functioning democracy, I should be saddened that our options for the presidency are being limited so soon, but lets face it, Dodd and Biden really didn’t bring anything new to the table. These two senators have experience up the yin yang, but their messages never differed enough from the so-called “front-runners” in this fixed race. Dodd is Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee that regulates the financial and banking industries, and raised about one-fourth of his funds from them. Biden is Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and tried to win votes by explaining that almost everything his populist anti-war rivals wanted to do was unrealistic. Though definitely admirable contenders, they weren’t exactly a break from the status quo.

As you well know by now, Obama won the Iowa caucuses with 38%, Edwards came in second with 30%, and the “inevitable” Hillary Clinton followed close behind with 29%. So what do these results say about the American people? Not a damn thing. First of all, it’s Iowa. Secondly, the caucuses are an entirely undemocratic process where “the media is a co-conspirator in the con“. And third, um… it’s still fucking Iowa!

Even with the homogeneous demographics of Iowa being as far away as they are from the major concentrations of Democratic voters nationally, these results truly say more about the handful of special interests who shaped this scheme than Iowans themselves. Any “journalist” who tries to squeeze any more meaning out of these results is selling you something. And therein lies the role of the Iowa caucuses, to act as fodder for media propaganda. The power of the caucus doesn’t lie in its ability to predict, but to convince. The corporate media will use these results to convince us that these are our opinions. We will be told that we actually do want Obama as president, and that these results are undeniable evidence that we support the exclusion of Kucinich and Gravel from ABC’s debates. In reality, these are the results of a screwy process controlled by a handful of influential white people. If other Democratic presidential candidates were as honest as Kucinich and Gravel have been about Iowa, they’d rail against this tyranny within the Democratic Party rather than play into such a detrimental lie.

So even though I’m not entirely saddened to see Dodd and Biden go, I am sad that they left specifically because of this sham. Their decisions to bow out now only give credence to the idea that Iowa matters. We can only hope that their supporters are more enlightened than they are to ignore this soap opera and flock to Kucinich, Gravel, or even Richardson.