Contributor Makes News

PERIODISMO SIN FRONTERAS

El Diario de El Paso | 18-11-2011 | 00:05

"Presentarán 30 denuncias más por robo de salario" Lorena Figueroa

Cuando Conny Ibarra y su hermana Guadalupe obtuvieron empleo en una casa de la zona Centro para cuidar a una anciana de 90 años y realizar trabajo doméstico, pensaron que sería por mucho tiempo.

Pero en abril, luego de casi un año de laborar, la patrona de ambas decidió suspenderles sin ninguna explicación su sueldo, además de amenazarlas y agredirlas para que no le cobraran, dijeron.

"Es una injusticia. No trabajamos de ‘a gratis”, expresó Conny, quien dijo que ella y su hermana han tratado de recuperar sin éxito más de mil 600 dólares por todos los medios posibles a su alcance.

El caso de las hermanas Ibarra se encuentra entre una treintena de denuncias que el Comité de Justicia Laboral prepara para presentarlas ante las autoridades ahora que ha entrado en vigor una nueva ley en el estado la cual facilita el arresto y proceso judicial de empleadores que ‘roban’ el salario a sus empleados.

El ‘robo’ consta en pagar menos del salario mínimo federal de 7.25 dólares por hora u ofrecer un pago incompleto o nulo de lo acordado con los trabajadores.

“El problema es más grande de lo que imaginamos”, expresó ayer la líder del comité, Lidia Cruz.

Manifestó que, tan es así, que en la organización civil se registran entre tres y cinco quejas cada semana, de trabajadores que no recibieron su sueldo o sólo parte de él.

Cruz admitió, sin embargo, que la mayoría de los casos son resueltos luego de que la víctima, a través del comité laboral, negocia con el patrón “abusador” para llegar a un acuerdo de pago.

En otras ocasiones, el resultado no es favorable y es cuando se trata de integrar los casos para su posible denuncia, dijo.

La activista comentó que, suman unos 30 casos relacionados con el ‘robo de salario’, de los cuales se están documentando las evidencias necesarias para presentarlas ya sea, ante el Departamento de Policía o la oficina del Sheriff.

Las corporaciones policíacas son las instancias que reciben las quejas de las víctimas para, a su vez, hacer las indagatorias y arrestos necesarios y presentar los casos a la procuraduría de distrito.

Cruz mencionó que, entre los casos “listos” se encuentra el de medio centenar de choferes a quienes una empresa transportista les dejó de pagar y hasta cambió de nombre para “protegerse” de ser denunciada.

También está el caso de las hermanas Ibarra, que están intentando que sean regresadas sus pertenencias de la casa de su ex patrona, además del dinero que se les debe. (Lorena Figueroa)

COURTESY OF El Diario de El Paso

http://www.diario.com.mx/notas.php?f=2011%2F11%2F18&id=e971e93892cd239674590eabc0d15423

Understanding Latin America's Revolutionary and Counterrevolutionary 20th Century

In his introduction to A Century of Revolution, series editor Greg Grandin urges historians to rethink Latin America’s revolutionary and counterrevolutionary twentieth-century. Grandin offers a number of programmatic suggestions to historians, including the need to acknowledge the adaptability and dynamism of counterrevolution.[1] In particular, he draws attention to how counterinsurgent terror in Latin America eliminated alternative development programs and ensured subordination to the economic and political neoliberal protocols of what became known as the Washington Consensus.[2] Several of the essays in this volume explore how counterinsurgent military regimes brokered Latin America’s “transition to democracy” and how their brutal “success” against leftist guerrillas and popular movements made the region’s radical free market policies possible.[3] Peter Winn, Gerardo Rénique, and Forrest Hylton all shed light upon these processes of counterrevolution and neoliberal expansion in Chile, Peru, and Colombia.

In “Furies of the Andes,” Peter Winn describes how Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity government tried to pioneer a nonviolent road to democratic socialism between 1970 and 1973.[4] Despite provocations from the right, Allende steadfastly refused to arm his supporters against a mounting counterrevolution financed by the United States and carried out by the Chilean Right. As a result, the “Chilean Experiment” was violently overthrown in a military coup that installed the most repressive dictatorship in that nation’s history. The counterrevolution was both adaptable and dynamic. Not only did it begin before the 9/11 coup, it also cast a shadow over the Chilean Revolution from the beginning.[5] It promised to defend Christian civilization and the sacred right of private property against a godless, communist internal enemy.[6] The counterrevolutionaries offered a new vision for Chile’s future, but that vision called for the restoration and reinforcement of the ruling classes. The new Chile left no room for Allende’s supporters. As a result, the Pinochet regime ordered the mass detention and torture of tens of thousands of leftists, students, workers, peasants, and shantytown dwellers and the “disappearances” of some 3,000 Chileans. Winn argues that this strategy not only neutralized Allende’s base, but also ensured that popular opposition would never emerge in the future.[7] By suppressing popular memory of Allende, Pinochet paved the way for the new Chile, rapidly implementing capitalist “shock therapy” while tightening his grip over Chilean political and social life.

Gerardo Rénique considers how the military’s suppression of the Sendero Luminoso and the democratic left between 1980 and 1992 made the expansion of neoliberal reforms in Peru possible. In his essay entitled “People’s War, Dirty War,” Rénique argues that both left and the right have conveniently blamed the Sendero Luminoso for the genesis and propagation of violence and terror that crippled Peruvian society in the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, the nation’s political parties have drawn attention away from Peru’s exploitative and exclusionary social system while justifying state violence as “reactive” responses to left-wing provocation.[8] Furthermore, this perspective ignores how counterinsurgency created a situation in which the state used fear to normalize and further its own violence against both the Sendero Luminoso and the growing popular resistance to President Alberto Fujimori’s (1990-2000) neoliberal policies.[9] Rénique retraces Peru’s long and bloody road to neoliberalism, explaining how the Peruvian military fused together national development and security objectives during the mid-1960s. After suppressing the MIR guerrillas in 1966, military leaders presented themselves as agents of modernization and civilization while recasting leftist politics, both insurgent and democratic, as “Cuban contagions.”[10] Thus, Rénique argues that the Peruvian military waged “preventive defense” against both real and potential enemies.[11] As in Chile, the counterinsurgency profoundly shaped the political and cultural imagination of Peruvian society as memory of war and the privatizations of neoliberal reforms combined to undermine the appeals of the left.[12] Alternatives to the Washington Consensus were either eliminated outright or pushed to the margins of the Peruvian political landscape in the 1990s.

In Colombia, Forrest Hylton argues that counterinsurgency laid the foundations for not only capital accumulation and neoliberal reforms, but also state formation. Beginning in the late 1980s, counterinsurgency combined with economic neoliberalization to “re-feudalize” social relations in Medellin and successfully consolidate a state through an alliance of paramilitaries, organized crime, and neoliberals. While combating the leftist FARC and ELN, Hylton describes how the counterinsurgency oversaw and implemented Medellin’s successful transition from a declining manufacturing center to a FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) economy anchored in the production and export of cocaine.[13] In the aftermath of Pablo Escobar’s murder and the dismantling of the Medellin Cartel, narcoparamilitaries sought to regain foreign investment in Medellin by “pacifying” the city, waging a dirty war against popular militias, organized labor, leftists, and other critics of the counterinsurgency and the neoliberal economic model. By precluding the emergence of a national popular bloc, narcoparamilitarism continues to rule Medellin. For Hylton, narcoparamilitarism represents “neoliberalism in extremis,” in which private economic-political power supplants the state in the form of a parastate that performs state functions but is opposed to democratic accountability.[14]

These essays highlight the dynamism and adaptability of counterrevolution, explaining how counterinsurgency “cleansed” Latin America of internal threats and anti-modern forces while paving the way toward neoliberal reform. In Chile, Peter Winn describes how Pinochet’s counterrevolution not only restored traditional hierarchies and vanquished an internal enemy, but also ensured that Allende’s Popular Unity would never re-emerge to derail Chile’s capitalist “shock therapy.” In Peru, Gerardo Rénique argues that the military justified its sweeping counterinsurgency as a necessary reaction to Cuban-style insurgents and used the dirty war to suppress the democratic opposition to the Washington Consensus in the 1990s. Finally, Forrest Hylton reveals how counterinsurgents in Colombia sought not only to end a now five-decade civil war against Marxist guerrillas, but also to neoliberalize an economy propped by cocaine profits and defended by right-wing paramilitaries.

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[1] Greg Grandin and Gilbert Joseph, A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence During Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 400.

[2] Grandin, “Introduction: Living in Revolutionary Time,” 30.

[3] Gilbert Joseph, “Latin America’s Long Cold War,” 409.

[4] Peter Winn, “Furies of the Andes: Violence and Terror in the Chilean Revolution and Counterrevolution,” 239.

[5] Winn, 259.

[6] Ibid, 269.

[7] Ibid, 268.

[8] Gerardo Rénique, “People’s War, Dirty War: Cold War Legacy and the End of History in Postwar Peru,” 313.

[9] Rénique, 312.

[10] Ibid, 322-323.

[11] Ibid, 327.

[12] Ibid, 332.

[13] Forrest Hylton, “The Cold War That Didn’t End: Paramilitary Modernization in Medellin, Colombia,” 339.

[14] Ibid, 361.

The "I" Word

Discourse about immigration in the United States has heated up a lot lately.  Between having a presidential candidate talk about an electric border fence and having Alabama out-do Arizona for the "most stringent immigration policy" award, I often find myself embarrassed to identify as American.

After recently watching an extremely short video about ending the use of the "i" word (go to http://www.colorlines.com/droptheiword/blog/drop-the-i-word-friday-friend-9-year-old-sam.html), I realized that one of the parts of the debate about immigration reform that bothers me so deeply is the way we instantly "other" groups of people by labeling them.  Of course, I am referring to the way people who are in the United States without the proper papers are called "illegals," especially in the popular media.

This isn't the first time in history that a majority group has given a demeaning name to a minority group, and unfortunately I doubt it will be the last time, either.  Just like most derogatory language, "illegal" is used to create an artificial barrier of fear, hatred, and ignorance between groups of people.  It neglects the humanity that all people share; it doesn't acknowledge individuals as mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, lovers, and friends. It also doesn't take into account that all people have hopes, dreams, fears, disappointments, and triumphs.

Word choice matters.  And so does seeing individuals as more than stereotypes.

In closing, I leave you with a Mayan saying called En Lak Ech (You are my other me):

Spanish: Tú eres mi otro yo. Si te daño a ti, me daño a mi mismo. Si te respeto a ti, me respeto a mi mismo.
English: You are my other me. If I harm you, I harm myself. If I respect you, I respect myself.

One of these things is not like the other

The United States symbolizes wealth, opportunity and freedom to many.  Yet, it symbolizes something much more than the familiar topics of rhetorical, ‘patriotic’ frequency. The palavering of Rush Limbaugh, for example, does not asymptotically approach the ends of symbolism in the U.S. But no single person could speak to the immense wealth of variety. In terms of its behemoth, symbolic status, we simply recognize that the U.S. has an unimaginably diverse population. 

The U.S. might very well be on the avant-garde in terms of leading other nations in domestic diversity; it also surpasses any in its amount of polemics, polemics having both direct and indirect connections to that diversity. Take, for instance, the popular, symbolic notion that the U.S. is a “Christian nation.” This idea is highly problematic whether a ‘democratic’ majority favors it or not. The widely disseminated idea that even non-Christians belong to a “Christian nation” persists. This idea has been abuzz for centuries, and it continues to affect numerous American institutions today as always.

Slavery is one prime example, a more obvious institution affected by Christianity in U.S. history. The slaves in the U.S. were often times spoon-fed Christianity, and one safely speculates that slaves were inculcated against their wills at one time or another. One might also wonder about the unchristian nature of slaves’ quotidian mistreatment at the hands of their masters—or, “fellow Christians.” No intelligent person would deny the incongruity here. And it is likely that this unchristian treatment grew even more oppressive to the salve, who, after the Civil war, came to understand that he or she chiefly remained a cog for the industrial wheel of the North. 

Is it peculiar, though, that so much presidential and representational rhetoric teems with religion and especially Christian-natured themes in a country like the U.S.? It is, after all, a country which adamantly defends its claim to the separation of church and state. Blanketing a diverse nation of millions with the uniformity of one sole religion is a logical problem—even if politically it is poorly assessed on the whole. At the very least we can distinguish truth from sentiment: it does not stand to reason that, because “so many Americans” are Christian, the nation itself is Christian. It would not matter if the majority in the U.S. is Christian. This predicament is par excellence an example of the informal logical fallacy known as the “fallacy of composition”—when one infers that something is necessarily true of the whole because it is true of a part of that whole. It is akin to saying that the bolt which fastens the wing of the plain to the plain weighs little, and therefore the plain itself weighs little. It is nonsense.  

How then does a country of 300-plus million people—containing all the diversity in the world—symbolize religious pluralism? Or does it care to do so? Religion as a matter of fact affects the diversity in the U.S., and is forever present, always participating in the most urgent conflicts which arise day-in and day-out. One need only witness the burning of a Mosque, or to find gays condemned by Evangelical Fundamentalists to savor the political nature of religious affiliation in the U.S. 

Today, the Christian population of the U.S. spans all sects and traditions, and largely constitutes the makeup of the country’s general religious base. American Christians (be they ancestors of slaves or otherwise) are not anomalous either. In the West, Christianity has long since domineered religious traditions. Wittingly or not, American Christians are ultimately participants in this unfurling history of the Occident. They are the inheritors of a religion of empire, as they are the inheritors of Western imperium altogether. And perhaps American Christians are emboldened by a religious tradition that complements national pride. It may just be an easy paradigm to accept, a paradigm that makes sense. 

But if a nation with such diversity purports itself to be ‘Christian’ (by the voices of some and obviously not all), and if the tradition of Christianity’s overall role in the West has served imperial as well as formative purposes, then heralding any country as such—Christian—is nothing new. In fact, little is new about Christianity’s role in the unfolding of Western civilization. It is a religion that served the Roman emperors—starting with Constantine—and procured many votes for U.S. Presidents including George W. Bush and Barack Obama alike. 

In so many ways the history of the U.S. has been written with the blood, sweat and tears of many marginalized and disenfranchised groups. But this is not the reflection to be found in today’s proud and popular symbolic rhetoric of the United States’ past. Nevertheless, we should not exclude or forget paramount ideas, clues and examples we can implement to illuminate the paradigm of centuries past. For example, Christianity served a purpose in Manifest Destiny, and thus it played lackey to the atrocities of both murder and displacement of so many American indigenous groups.

It is not merely a religious tradition of which we speak; Christianity is an example of history’s own prostitution of religion for the purposes of governing powerful groups, and for waging wars and conquests. True, religion may govern the politics of some in ways much more far-reaching than public policies or campaign promises. However, it too has been subjugated for the purposes of profit and for the acquiescent domestication of millions—and not slaves alone.

Where do your bananas come from?

In Banana Cultures, John Soluri rethinks the banana’s transformation from a tropical plant to a food commodity.[1] Prior scholarship contended that “omnipotent U.S. banana companies” created markets for agro export commodities on their own. But Soluri challenges these assumptions by explaining how cultural, economic, and social processes gave rise to mass markets for bananas in the United States that were often shaped by their interactions with banana plants, pathogens, and working people on the North Coast of Honduras.[2] He argues that export banana farms were “simultaneously linked to international commodity chains and a web of agroecological relationships that constrained, resisted, and confounded the power of the fruit companies and their allies.”[3] Soluri concludes that the dynamics of mass production and mass consumption and their connections to social and environmental change shaped the historical trajectory of export banana production in Honduras and elsewhere.[4]

John Soluri describes how interactions among banana growers, exporters, consumers, and the Honduran state favored the Gros Michel banana in U.S. markets. As multinational corporations like the United Fruit Company gained key railroad and tax concessions from the Honduran government, they converted huge swaths of state land into Gros Michel banana monocultures. These monocultures fell prey to fungal pathogens like the Panama Disease that “invaded the North Coast” between 1910 and 1940.[5] Reluctant to export a banana that did not resemble the wildly popular Gros Michel banana, U.S. fruit companies simply abandoned diseased farms and relocated to pathogen free soils. This strategy brought them into conflict with one another, the Honduran government, and local cultivators.[6]

While Soluri demonstrates that migrant day laborers at times contested big fruit’s hegemony, they could not sustain the onslaught of the Sigatoka disease. U.S. fruit companies combated the Sigatoka disease by creating a capital and labor-intensive control system that cut jobs and depended on heavy irrigation and chemical spraying that priced out small farmers. After pathogen-free soils were exhausted, the United Fruit Company crossbred several varieties to create the Cavendish banana. Advertising agencies quickly recognized the importance of “branding” export bananas and created a subjective discourse of “quality” that “inculcated consumers with the idea that not all bananas were the same.”[7] The Cavendish banana, christened the Chiquita Banana in 1963, triggered a massive increase in United Fruit’s profits from $1.7-$25 million between 1963 and 1966.[8]

John Soluri challenges dependista historiography that largely accepts the monolithic role of U.S. fruit companies in creating markets for agro export commodities on their own. Soluri’s survey of agroecological change in Honduras’ North Coast suggests instead that the United Fruit Company and its rivals were, “entangled in a dynamic relationship with processes of mass production.”[9] Soluri’s examination of the interactions between banana plants, pathogens, and working people reveals how cultural and biophysical processes shaped economic institutions (including corporations and markets) and vice versa.[10] Viewed from the ground level, “export banana production appeared more like a series of improvisations (both creative and destructive in nature) than a well-scripted global power play.”[11]

John Soluri’s comparison of banana markets with those of other agro exports commodities precludes him from further investigating export banana production in the 1990s and the last decade. He mentions, but does not analyze, the emergence of popular organic food and fair trade movements that would have strengthened his argument concerning how cultural processes and complex agroecological systems affect mass production and mass consumption. Nevertheless, Soluri provides fascinating research that challenges the privileged role given to U.S. fruit companies in shaping export markets. First, he demonstrates how local cultivators dominated the market in the late nineteenth century. Second, he pays attention to marginalized actors like the poquitero squatters of Lot 19, La Paz, and how United Fruit’s relocation strategy inadvertently fostered expressions of Honduran nationalism that “did not readily conform to images of omnipotent fruit companies usurping the lands of hapless smallholders.”[12] Finally, Soluri skillfully uses oral histories to describe working life on banana plantations, not just of weed pickers and day laborers, but also of foremen and chemical sprayers. Soluri’s study of the devastating ecological effects of monocultures challenges neoliberal development models that encourage capital investment in agroexport commodity economies.

Edward Shore is a first year graduate student in the History Department at The University of Texas at Austin.

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[1] John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 7.

[2] Ibid 13.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, 218.

[5] Soluri 14.

[6] Ibid, 14, 72.

[7] Ibid, 187.

[8] Ibid, 191.

[9] Ibid, 232.

[10] Soluri, 217.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid, 101.

Fuera Cholos

Fuera cholos. That was the first thing I noticed as the bus pulled into the terminal in Arica. Someone had taken a can of spray paint and tagged a perimeter wall of the place where most Peruvians and Bolivians enter Chile. This was their welcome. This was my welcome.

I had been living in Tacna, Peru for several months by the time I actually made it across the border into Chile. The trip is surprisingly quick and I was in Arica about an hour after leaving Tacna. The sister cities have a long and complicated history not unlike those of the communities that straddle the US-Mexico border. Many tacneños will tell you how Arica was stolen by the Chileans during the War of the Pacific. It’s amazing that 130 years later, they can’t seem to let it go. Ever since they were young, the tacneños were told that they Chileans were aggressors and continue to exploit their Peruvian neighbors at every opportunity.

When I got out of the colectivo at the terminal in Arica, I made my way to the center of town. The streets were orderly, buses stopped at predetermined intersections, and young people were dressed in skinny jeans with neon shirts. In other words, it was nothing like Peru. I struck up conversation with the woman who waited on me at a restaurant. “Oh, you’re from the States. That’s so cool…what brings you all the way to Arica?” Her tone was welcoming and you could tell she was enamored with anything and everything from the US. I explained that I lived in Tacna and was visiting for the day. She recoiled and immediately asked how I could live there. Wasn’t it dangerous? Aren’t the people there uncultured? How do you stand all the dirt?

The bluntness of her barrage of questions took me off guard. I found myself in a defensive position that was bizarre because I’m not even from Peru. But I have felt nothing less than welcomed into this dirty, confusing, disorganized place. No, I don’t feel unsafe walking around Tacna. Yes, the people there are cultured and in fact their food, songs, and dances are incredibly beautiful and varied. And my neighbors take pride in keeping their modest homes tidy.

How is it that an arbitrary line in the sands of the Atacama Desert can create such distrust and misconception of those living on the other side? Why is it that we’ve allowed borders to have such power and control over our collective understanding of society? Do Chileans not love their families or seek happiness or desire fulfillment just as much as Peruvians? Or Americans? Or Mexicans? Or Iraqis? Or Chinese? Or Palestinians? Or Israelis?

It is true that in recent years, there has been an influx of Bolivian and Peruvian immigrants to northern Chile. Like their Mesoamerican counterparts, many make the difficult decision to leave their homes and their families in search of better opportunities. I taught several students in Tacna whose mother or father or both parents lived in Arica and cleaned people’s houses so as to earn enough money to support their now abandoned children. If they had a choice between living with their families and working in their own country or working in Chile, I doubt many would choose the latter. It just astounds me that when we look at another human being we can fail to see so much. They are quickly labeled as different: cholo, Mexican, Arab, gringo. We fail to see what unites us, the common thread that makes up the fabric of our very humanity. There is no reason to feel threatened when one takes the time to ask the other’s name and to listen to their story.


Cara Caponi is a 3rd year volunteer in Perú with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps

The Writing on the Wall

In 1989, Noam Chomsky claimed that during the, “Revolutionary War period…there was vicious repression of dissident opinion.” These early repressive measures were signs of future policy, and perhaps too a portent for the design and implementation of societal norms to come. 

The late historian Howard Zinn supports Chomsky’s view, and arms us with the historical fact that in a short while, only “…seven years after the First Amendment became part of the Constitution, Congress passed a law very clearly abridging the freedom of speech” in America. Passed under John Adam’s administration, the Sedition Act of 1798 made it illegal to say anything “false, scandalous and malicious” against the President, Congress or the government.

The passage of the Sedition Act of 1798 conveniently served Congress in its earliest days, allowing for unprecedented control over speech in America. Rooted in the British common law of “seditious libel,” this specific act allowed Congress to legally punish an offender after committing his or her crime; in other words, expressing their dissent. Concerning the consequences of this act, Zinn is of the opinion that, “since punishment after the fact is an excellent deterrent to the exercise of free expression, the claim of ‘no prior restraint’ itself is destroyed.” It is not too much to consider this legislation a major detriment. 

Today we may naively suspect Congress as apprehensive when it comes to abridging too transparently the freedoms afforded us by the Bill of Rights. It may not necessarily be the modus operandi of legislators nowadays to be as flamboyant in their legislative powers as they were in 1798. But if this 18^th century act concerned speech in general, it invariably affected other societal components like the media. And if freedoms regarding speech have markedly changed, it is important to question how something like the media has also been retooled.

We may very well consider the fact that centuries have passed since the American Revolution, and that the delivery of media has changed over the centuries. This does not mean, however, that the media’s function has changed as drastically as say, the pamphleteering of Thomas Paine in contrast to the ‘status updates’ one encounters on Facebook. Something like the automobile has also changed over the years. Nevertheless, it remains a vehicle.

Regarding change in the media, Chomsky argues that, “mechanisms today are much more subtle” in assuring the repression of dissident opinion. His book Manufacturing Consent espouses the ‘Propaganda Model’. This model reveals that the typical opinion in the United States is that we have a media, “which must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the right of the people to know, and to help the population assert meaningful control over the political process.” Chomsky’s ‘Propaganda Model’ exposes our media to be one which, in reality, “will present a picture of the world which defends and inculcates the economic, social and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate the domestic economy, and who therefore also largely control the government.” The media then remains useful for the powerful elite, and releases them from the need to control by force. Thus, it allows them to control the public’s conscious.  

Chomsky states that this very philosophy has been at work publically for over 300 years in “Anglo-American democratic thought”— since the English Civil War in the 1640s. Charles II was restored as king in 1660, but the politics had changed countrywide. In 1689, the constitutional monarchy was adopted along with a Bill of Rights. Chomsky avers that the recognition of a need to control what people think when they can no longer be herded by force has, in the United States, “reached its apogee.” 

Given the fact that the media serves a purpose whether its purpose is considerably disputable or not, it does imbue public opinion, and it does hold some sway over the course of politics. If what Chomsky has argued nationwide for decades is true—that, newspapers and other news sources are lucrative because of their ability to sell their readership, and to sell it purposefully—and if the nature of this beast is as historically evident as Zinn makes it out to be, then we can reasonably ask if this media serves our collective interest at all. If sales mean profit and if the spectrum of opinion is designed albeit varied in nature, then selling readership can help to assure how power is maintained. Understanding this connection makes it difficult to obfuscate a public opinion which directly lends itself to the kind of stories which appear, how they are written, and in whose interest they are presented.

The ‘Propaganda Model’ can help us to consider the fact that where popular consent is both maintainable and profitable, the press will indeed present what is self-serving. Chomsky presses the simple and commonsensical view that a media so lucrative and secure would not go against its own interest in its reporting. The dynamic is precise here, and sales make evident the parallel. Chomsky says that, “…in fact, very often a journal that’s in financial trouble will try to cut down its circulation, and what they’ll try to do is up-scale their readership, because that increases advertising rates.”  The more ‘informed’ the readership is, and the more powerfully privileged which that readership happens to be, the more certain or predictable the destiny of popular consent will be. 

This dreadful, servile press system reports bona fide what continues to immure the history of public opinion and consent.  Given its manner of subsistence, to consider the press as ‘free’ is one thing; to freely accept what the press reports, creates or distorts, is something altogether different. It shapes the destiny of popular control.  

Seriously considered, the ‘Propaganda Model’ can have some foreseeable and troublesome consequences for the everyday paradigm of America’s daughters and sons. It is probable that the majority of persons in the U.S. would neither be able nor willing to admit that they unknowingly ensconce an ignorance which shapes their politics and society. They no doubt would wish to deny their ignorance or find the thought perverse. But once unveiled, it ought to sound the alarm. 

Thanks to a history of paternalism, a history where the disenfranchised have been suppressed by a government which gears itself towards the preservation of unevenly distributed wealth, and also toward the tiny echelons of power which assume the position of the country’s overseers, the great population of the most powerful country in the world might begin to find itself guided like a corralled hog to its trough and slop. And thanks to the ever present, reoccurring shibboleths of our self-proclaimed democratic discourse, the most powerful country guarantees for itself, its people, inequality. 

Let the mythology shrouding the Founding Fathers perish. Zinn indicates that, “…they did not want a balance, except one which kept…a balance among the dominant forces…” The Founding Fathers did “not want an equal balance between slaves and masters, propertyless and property holders, Indians and white.” They most certainly did not consider balance or equality between men and women. Zinn also discusses the shrewdness of our forbearers: “They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power…they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support of a new, privileged leadership.”

Our public conscious may be amnesic and abetted by a scandalous media, one rooted largely in a press that reports what is best for the status quo and therefore reports what is also best for the upper echelons of society. It would be impossible, then, for everything America historically experiences to be as providential as it appears in grade school textbooks nationwide. 

Let us consider Lincoln as good proof of a non-existent American history guided by messianic and righteous figures. His presidency is also proof that media during the time of the Civil War was presenting precisely what Chomsky’s ‘Propaganda Model’ predicts: an array of opinions. Lincoln writes in 1862 to Horace Greeley, then editor of the New York Tribune, that, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it…What I do about Slavery and the colored race, I do because it helps to save this Union…” 

If one recalls their 5^th grade history text, one would also recall the popularly, collective historic analysis and perspective of Lincoln’s presidency as portrayed in that text. One may find what Zinn labels as Lincoln’s distinction “between his ‘personal wish’ and his ‘official duty’” not to be in accord with the palatable, popular memory of Lincoln and his presidency. Certainly few can recall the fact that "...those daring to criticize Lincoln's policies would be put in jail without trial--perhaps thirty thousand political prisoners."

Some may confront a different paradigm of such an icon as Lincoln with an outright averse reaction. Then again, we are considering the history of a country subservient to the powerful elites, a country whose first president was the richest man in America. History viewed thus makes the vicious repression of dissident opinion during the time of the Revolution completely understandable. It makes intelligible the media’s role today. 

The point to be made when seeking a more honest and democratic press and media (and perhaps a more realistic approach to history too) is not to point out that a certain President preserved the Union or that he was the chief aggressor in a civil war. The best excuse we have for disabusing ourselves of so many interests which serve to maintain elite power is, ultimately, to be free. 

If this is true—that we desire to be free—then the grand underpinning is the assumption that a desire for truth and freedom exists. However, to foment truth and freedom may require of us a decline in overall hubris. This may only be feasible once if our dominant paradigm is subverted, and beings to shift. Let it not be said of us as Karl Marx said of his fellow Germans in Modern Europe: “Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down might not see him. We draw the magic cap down over our eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.”

Citations:
Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States: 1492-present. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Print.
Chomsky, Noam, Peter R. Mitchell, and John Schoeffel. Understanding Power: the Indispensable Chomsky. New York: New, 2002. Print.

Inaugural Post

Peace Constructions is a literary approach to peaceful thinking. Peace Constructions provides thought and consideration for polemical issues both past and present, and does so with the full intention of betterment for the human condition in our new century.

The mission-identity of Peace Constructions fundamentally roots itself in a more progressive democracy and a radical peace.

That which undergirds every article is the assumed agenda of inclusion, consideration and deliberation. Instep with this mainstay of our articles, the telos of publication is to foment ideas, perspectives and progressive opinions, never wavering from the inborn promotion of Peace Constructions: freedom for all humanity.

Contributions from our source of editorship and writers should provide the reader and free thinker with a base of interests. One can expect these published topics to be kaleidoscopic in both nature and breadth. Ultimately, and, in order to broaden our collective and contemporary horizons, all publications submitted and posted will hold as paramount in consideration the progress of unfolding human freedom.

In summary, all writing serves its readership by evincing the need for or existence of freedom that peaceful measures engender and champion globally. And so, we say with Paulo Freire, "From these pages I hope at least the following will endure: my trust in people, and my faith in men and women, and in the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love."