We're number what, we're number what?

If donating 0.25% of one's budget to assisting the world's poor is generous, then the United States is one of the most generous countries in the world, and I am one of the most generous people in the world.

From here:
"And perhaps most disturbing, more than half of Americans today believe that the United States spends 24 per cent of its budget on aid to poor countries. In reality, the figure is actually less than one-quarter of one percent -- so the public view is off the mark by about 10,000 percent. As individuals, Americans are not stingy. They personally donated more to tsunami relief in Asia than their own government did. But they are woefully uninformed and misinformed by the media through which they perceive the world."

The US government spends 0.25% of it's budget on foreign aid. Which at any rate comprises mostly military aid and loans - which must be paid back by the poor country's people, while the money routinely goes to developed nations' corporations to build often needless infrastructure (or needed only by extractive industries that sell the country's resources at cheap prices to rich foreigners while concentrating profits in the hands of a few well-connected businessmen), with kickbacks of course going to the countries' often corrupt leaders. Meanwhile the magic of compound interest ensures that poor people the world over will for a long time be in the perverse position of paying out more money in interest and debt repayment to the governments of the world's wealthiest countries than these same countries offer in foreign aid.

"One therefore is tempted to question just what the term 'aid' has come to mean. Etymologically, aid in its modern sense means to help, assist, afford support or relief. But in feudal law it meant a customary payment made by a vassal or tenant to his lord. There is a certain irony here, because what has principally been helped by U.S. aid programs is the U.S. balance of payments, U.S. industry and commerce, and long-range U.S. strategic goals. Over time the net flow of foreign exchange is not from the United States to aid-borrowing countries as implied in the modern connotation of the term 'aid,' but from the borrowers to the United States as in the feudal connotation. So-called foreign aid is, indeed, feudatory. Aid has imposed vassalage on developing countries in the form of contractual debt services which represent mortgages on their future balance-of-payments earning power, as well as heavy opportunity costs of foregoing actions designed to guide their economies towards self-sustaining growth according to their independent desires." (From Super Imperialism by Michael Hudson)

If you want to see an arena in which the US government is (and has been, since Eisenhower warned about the military industrial complex) generous, look no further than the booming business of turning plowshares into swords:




So please do not make the mistake of attributing to the US government the quality of "generosity" in the foreign aid department, just because your information-malnourished mammalian brain can't get over the primitive desire to believe "we good, they bad." Because when it comes to aid:

WE'RE NUMBER (TWENTY) ONE! WE'RE NUMBER (TWENTY) ONE!

Net ODA in 2007 as percent of Gross National Income

Country	Aid amount by GNI
Source: OECD Development Statistics Online last accessed Sunday, April 27, 2008
Norway	0.95
Sweden	0.93
Luxembourg	0.9
Denmark	0.81
Netherlands	0.81
Ireland	0.54
Austria	0.49
Belgium	0.43
Spain	0.41
Finland	0.4
France	0.39
Germany	0.37
Switzerland	0.37
UK	0.36
Australia	0.3
Canada	0.28
New Zealand	0.27
Italy	0.19
Portugal	0.19
Japan	0.17
Greece	0.16
USA	0.16

Why they call him McNasty

(I first saw this posted on the Counterpunch website this afternoon - as of this moment it was no longer up there, so I'm posting it here.)

My Holiday with John McCain by Ana Dubey

"It was just before John McCain’s last run at the presidential nomination in 2000 that my husband and I vacationed in Turtle Island in Fiji with John McCain, Cindy, and their children, including Bridget (their adopted Bangladeshi child).

It was not our intention, but it was our misfortune to be in close quarters with John McCain for almost a week, since Turtle Island has a small number of bungalows and their focus on communal meals force all vacationers who are there at the same time to get to know each other intimately.

He arrived at our first group meal and started reading quotes from a pile of William Faulkner books with a forest of Post-Its sticking out of them. As an English Literature major myself, my first thought was “if he likes this so much, why hasn't he memorized any of this yet?” I soon realized that McCain actually thought we had come on vacation to be a volunteer audience for his “readings” which then became a regular part of each meal. Out of politeness, none of the vacationers initially protested at this intrusion into their blissful holiday, but people’s buttons definitely got pushed as the readings continued day after day.

Unfortunately this was not his only contribution to our mealtime entertainment. He waxed on during one meal about how Indo-Chine women had the best figures and that our American corn-fed women just couldn't meet up to this standard. He also made it a point that all of us should stop Cindy from having dessert as her weight was too high and made a few comments to Amy, the 25 year old wife of the honeymooning couple from Nebraska that she should eat less as she needed to lose weight.

McCain’s appreciation of the beauty of Asian women was so great that David the American economist had to move his Thai wife to the other side of the table from McCain as McCain kept aggressively flirting with and touching her.

Needless to say I was irritated at his large ego and his rude behavior towards his wife and other women, but decided he must have some redeeming qualities as he had adopted a handicapped child from Bangladesh. I asked him about this one day, and his response was shocking: “Oh, that was Cindy’s idea – I didn't have anything to do with it. She just went and adopted this thing without even asking me. You can't imagine how people stare when I wheel this ugly, black thing around in a shopping cart in Arizona . No, it wasn't my idea at all.”

I actively avoided McCain after that, but unfortunately one day he engaged me in a political discussion which soon got us on the topic of the active US bombing of Iraq at that time. I was shocked when he said, “If I was in charge, I would nuke Iraq to teach them a lesson”. Given McCain’s personal experience with the horrors of war, I had expected a more balanced point of view. I commented on the tragic consequences of the nuclear attacks on Japan during WWII –- but no, he was not to be dissuaded. He went on to say that if it was up to him he would have dropped many more nuclear bombs on Japan. I rapidly extricated myself from this conversation as I could tell that his experience being tortured as a POW didn't seem to have mellowed out his perspective, but rather had made him more aggressive and vengeful towards the world.

My final encounter with McCain was on the morning that he was leaving Turtle Island. Amy and I were happily eating pancakes when McCain arrived and told Amy that she shouldn't be having pancakes because she needed to lose weight. Amy burst into tears at this abusive comment. I felt fiercely protective of Amy and immediately turned to McCain and told him to leave her alone. He became very angry and abusive towards me, and said, “Don't you know who I am.” I looked him in the face and said, “Yes, you are the biggest asshole I have ever met” and headed back to my cabin. I am happy to say that later that day when I arrived at lunch I was given a standing ovation by all the guests for having stood up to McCain’s bullying.

Although I have shared my McCain story informally with friends, this is the first time I am making this public. I almost did so in 2000, when McCain first announced his bid for the Republican nomination, but it soon became apparent that George Bush was the shoo-in candidate and so I did not act then. However, now that there is a very real possibility that McCain could be elected as our next president, I feel it is my duty as an American citizen to share this story. I can't imagine a more scary outcome for America than that this abusive, aggressive man should lead our nation. I have observed him in intimate surroundings as he really is, not how the media portrays him to be. If his attitudes toward women and his treatment of his own family are even a small indicator of his real personality, then I shudder to think what will happen to America were he to be elected as our President."

Review: The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas

The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas by Robert McChesney

"The pipelines of thought to the minds of the nation are being contracted and squeezed. About thirty men realistically dominate the conduits of thought through the ether, the printing presses, and the silver screen. Without wide diversity of thought, freedom of speech and press become idle bits of a worn-out shibboleth. The cartelization of the mind of America is well on the way."

So wrote a one-time lawyer for the Newspaper Guild in 1945. This book is a collection of McChesney's articles published in a variety of magazines and journals over the past couple of decades.

"'If the country is governed by public opinion, and public opinion is largely governed by the newspapers,' Harvard professor Hugo Munsterberg wrote in 1911, 'is it not essential to understand who governs the newspapers?'" Indeed, and that is what this book covers. Not to ruin the suspense, but the majority of the press is owned by only a handful of corporations. Even if there were absolutely no ideological consistency among the directors of these corporations, the mere need to profitably compete with each other would create pressure to cost-cut actual news gathering, just as it has been. It is this cost-cutting that has decimated newsrooms and foreign bureaus, and it is the need for profits that keeps news tame, bland and uninformative so as not to bother the customers - the advertisers. A radio reformer in the 1930s wrote presciently that "it is unavoidable that a commercial concern catering to the public will present a service as low in standards as the public will tolerate and will produce the most profit." Wait is there a Paris Hilton TV show on tonight?

So there's no need to posit that the men who run these corporations have an understanding to produce a vilely inept media so as to make people stupid and docile. The market is capable of doing that on its own. And if you think the market fucked up mortgage and investment banking, ratings and insurance pretty royally, you can only imagine what it has done to the press.

"[In the first half of the 20th century] the power of the press was axiomatic. 'The American press has more influence than it ever had in any other time, in any other country,' Will Irwin wrote in 1911. 'No other extrajudicial form except religion, is half so powerful.' Charles Edward Russell expressed the sentiments of many, when he wrote in La Follette's in 1910, 'If the people of the entire United States could be informed every day of exactly what happens at Washington and the reason for it, the peculiar stranglehold that the corporations have upon national legislation would last no longer than the next election.'"

That sounds like a pretty good reason to keep people uninformed of exactly what happens at Washington and the reason for it. And so it has been up until today. And in these days of chaos, with markets seizing up and crashing, wars all over the place and nuclear tensions building up, it's interesting to hear something a campaigner for more public control of radio said back in 1931-2:

"As a result of radio broadcasting, there will probably develop during the twentieth century either chaos or a world-order of civilization. Whether it shall be one or the other will depend largely upon whether broadcasting be used as a tool of education or as an instrument of selfish greed. So far, our American radio interests have thrown their major influence on the side of greed. ... There has never been in the entire history of the United States an example of mismanagement and lack of vision so colossal and far-reaching in its consequences as our turning of the radio channels almost exclusively into commercial hands.... I believe we are dealing here with one of the most crucial issues that was ever presented to civilization at any time in its entire history. ... In order to get large audiences they cultivate the lower appeals ... commercialized broadcasting as it is now regulated in America may threaten the very life of civilization by subjecting the human mind to all sorts of new pressures and selfish exploitations."

Today, "[i]t would astonish almost any person to see the extent of the research deployed by marketers and advertising agencies to brand their imprint on consumers' brains. Focus groups, psychologists, and cultural anthropologists are de rigueur in marketing research. Modern marketing is clearly the greatest concerted attempt at psychological manipulation in all of human history." Imagine if the greatest concerted attempt at psychological manipulation in all of human history had an aim other than compelling targets to buy this or that brand of detergent or junk food...

Sadly, this remains in the realm of the imaginary. John Updike commented in 1984, "I have no doubt that the aesthetic marvels of our age, for intensity and lavishness of effort and subtlety of both overt and subliminal effect, are television commercials. With the fanatic care with which Irish monks once ornamented the Book of Kells, glowing images of youthful beauty and athletic prowess, of racial harmony and exalted fellowship, are herein fluidly marshaled and shuffled to persuade us that a certain beer or candy bar, or insurance company or oil-based conglomerate, is ... the gateway to the good life."

Yeah, it sounds pretty funny when put that way. Leave it to a couple of Marxists, Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran, to ruin the mood: "It is sometimes argued that advertising really does little harm because no one believes it anymore anyway. We consider this view to be erroneous. The greatest damage done by advertising is precisely that it incessantly demonstrates the prostitution of men and women who lend their intellects, their voices, their artistic skills to purposes in which they themselves do not believe, and that it teaches 'the essential meaninglessness of all creations of the mind: words, images, and ideas.' The real danger from advertising is that it helps to shatter and ultimately destroy our most precious non-material possessions: the confidence in the existence of meaningful purposes of human activity and respect for the integrity of man."

In one of the final essays in the book, McChesney couches his argument in economic terms: "Even if media markets were competitive [which they are not] and even if income distribution were more egalitarian, the market would be a significantly flawed mechanism for regulating the media system in a free and democratic society. This is not to say that there would not be a role for the commercial marketplace, merely that the commercial media should not be hegemonic. The basic problem is that markets cannot deal with all sorts of important values people may wish to see in their media, and they understand as being necessary for their media system to generate. ... [M]edia owners increasingly produce inexpensive 'news' that avoids costly in-depth and controversial public affairs issues, and concentrate upon trivial or inconsequential stories or the regurgitation of press releases and public comments by those in power. The owners make money and the consumers consume what they are given and appear satisfied, so all is well, right? Wrong. There is a massive negative externality: the dismal journalism effects all in society, including those who are not consumers of commercial journalism. It leads to an ill-informed electorate that makes poor decisions, which affects public life and the health of the economy. It makes democracy, the notion of informed self-government, less plausible."

Review: The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics

The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics by Robin Kirk

Really good collection of a variety of excerpts from some interesting books. A lot of good poetry too; like Osman Morote's "A Frightening Thirst for Violence":

"The dictator
shifts his gaze
and a rose
acclaimed as fragrant
falls, in a slice,
from just one
beheading

The dictator
swivels his hands
and
one worker
falls, the wife of a
worker
falls, the children of a
worker
fall

Oh!
what a frightening thirst
for vengeance
devours me"

Morote became the second-in-command in the Shining Path, which the book treats even-handedly, except it does tend to leave out sufficient details of the kind of daily suffering due to exploitation and inequality that led people like Morote to sacrifice his life. The book does include testimony from a government soldier, casually discussing his rapes, murders and tortures, and mentions that during the war, far more people were killed by the government than by the rebels. Some surprise.

The best instance of a description of the kind of reality people lived in - terribly far away from the wealth and comfort of rich countries - that would explain a bit about why people would give up their lives in the Shining Path or the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement to create a better society: another poem, an excerpt from "The Battle of Ayacucho" by Antonio Cisneros, which strips of glory the decisive battle that won Peru independence from Spain:

"...
From a Mother
again

My sons and the rest of the dead still
belong to the owner of the horses
and the owner of the lands, and the battles.

A few apple trees grow among their bones
and the tough gorse. That's how they fertilize
this dark tilled land,
That's how they serve the owner
of war, hunger, and the horses."

Leftist tired being right

Georgia Eager to Rebuild Its Defeated Armed Forces by C. J. Chivers and Thom Shanker

God it's getting wearisome to be Left, because it's tiring to be right... all... the... time. From Dubya being an idiot and a disaster as president, or the Iraq war being a murderously bad idea, to neoliberal, unregulated market policies being dangerously wrongheaded, it's getting old to be vindicated time and time again.

Well, seeing the New York Times finally print an accurate rendition of the Georgia-Russia conflict is hardly vindication, yet it is nice to see in the country's preeminent de facto propaganda organ, even if it comes a month late and thirty-some-odd paragraphs into a distantly-related story:

"In the field, there is evidence from an extensive set of witnesses that within 30 minutes of Mr. Saakashvili’s order, Georgia’s military began pounding civilian sections of the city of Tskhinvali, as well as a Russian peacekeeping base there, with heavy barrages of rocket and artillery fire.

The barrages all but ensured a Russian military response, several diplomats, military officers and witnesses said.

After the Russian columns arrived through the Roki Tunnel, and the battle swung quickly into Russia’s favor, Georgia said its attack had been necessary to stop a Russian attack that already had been under way.

To date, however, there has been no independent evidence, beyond Georgia’s insistence that its version is true, that Russian forces were attacking before the Georgian barrages."

Playing catch up 2, 3, 4

The global financial mess: blaming the victims by Ann Pettifor

"The stupidity, poor economic analysis and sheer ignorance of those - central bankers, politicians, auditors - that have a duty to act as guardians of the nation's and the world's finances has had and will continue to have very grave consequences for the whole of the global economy, but also for millions of individual and corporate borrowers.

Their conduct stems in part from a failure of economic analysis. More precisely, the economics profession has failed to correctly analyse and alert policy makers to the impact of the finance sector - and of privatised credit creation - on the global economy. Indeed the economics profession has had a (not accidental?) blindspot for the role of haute finance in the economy, while at the same time encouraging its deregulation.

Now, just as the curtain is being raised on the house of cards built by the finance sector, so a cabal of economists is working to pull it down.

Their main concern is - of course - to protect the sector from governmental or democratic oversight and regulation, and to transfer private losses to taxpayers. To do so, they need to distract attention from the sector, limit debate, prevent a coherent analysis of the causes of the crisis emerging, and blind citizens to the "science" of finance.

The first tactic in the campaign to divert attention is to blame the victims. The most hapless of these are sub-prime borrowers - people in low-paid work earning $7 an hour in the poorest districts of Ohio (for example) who were persuaded by dodgy mortgage-floggers that they could take on a adjustable rate mortgage at "teaser rates", go to the ball and have a roof over their heads."

The Shape of Cuba's Reforms by Saul Landau and Nelson P. Valdés

"The Party has not changed enough, however, to satisfy disaffected Cubans, those unimpressed by past accomplishments. 'What do past glories have with to do with the uncertainty of daily life?' they ask. Possessing quality education, high skill levels and good health, they feel they deserve good jobs. Indeed, their entire school experience from day care through doctorates has taught them self esteem and stimulated them to expect the best. But quality jobs are scarce on the island – and in most third world countries. Several Cubans in their 20s and 30s offered glazed looks to references of the revolution’s accomplishments and replied: 'I don’t see much future for myself here.' Yes, a qualified Engineer can feel frustrated making pizzas eight hours a day. Frustration can also lead some to become oblivious to the outside conditions that affect their lives. Cuba exists within the larger globalized corporate economy, possesses limited resources, and remains victim of a seemingly eternal US super embargo."

A Shattered Myth in Georgia by Brendan Cooney

"It's a good thing for Putin that Bush has already set the course of the 21st century. Bush's aggression offers him a ready analogy: 'Of course, Saddam Hussein ought to have been hanged for destroying several Shiite villages,' Putin said. 'And the incumbent Georgian leaders who razed ten Ossetian villages at once, who ran elderly people and children with tanks, who burned civilians alive in their sheds — these leaders must be taken under protection.'

None of Putin's charges has yet been confirmed, although scattered reports of Georgian aggression in South Ossetia have started to trickle in. If true, we'll want to know more about what prompted Saakashvili's cockamamie attack. Russian leaders have also suggested Georgia got the green light from the United States, another insinuation yet to be confirmed.

It's too early to draw conclusions, but it would be hard to believe Saakashvili got his swagger from anywhere other than his ex-best bud, Bush, who once thrilled thousands of Georgians by jigging to one of their folk songs. As good as Saakashvili's English is, it's not surprising he was unable to see through the fake Texas accent of the paper tiger.

When you believe fervently in a myth, you discard anything that contradicts it. You forget that the United States recently smashed the territorial integrity of Afghanistan and Iraq and now wants to do the same in Iran. You might remember that it attacked Iraq in 1991 ostensibly for the sake of Kuwait's territorial integrity. But you forget that it exercises this rationale only with weak countries, never with strong. It allows Chinese abuses in Tibet, and will stand idly by while Russia invades Georgia and massacres people for years in Chechnya.

A bully does not stand up to other bullies. Russia knows it can do what it wants on its block while another bully stamps its foot at the other end of the street.

...

'It was just interesting to me that here we are, trying to promote peace and harmony, and we're witnessing a conflict take place,' said Bush Monday, while he was still playing grab-ass with the athletes in Beijing. The first sitting U.S. president to attend an Olympics on foreign soil, Bush returned to the White House to deliver the following words with a straight face:

'The Russian government must respect Georgia's territorial integrity and sovereignty.'

The Georgians no longer believe. Does anyone?

Ah yes, many of us here at home still do. The Times on Sunday published an op-ed by William Kristol describing the 'aggressive powers' of the world without even a self-reflexive twitch, not even a nod at the most aggressive power of them all. It's like Parisians used to say about the ugly Eiffel Tower when it first went up—the only time you can't see it is when you're inside it."

Playing catch up 1

Georgia Gets Its War On… McCain Gets His Brain Plaque… By Mark Ames

"The invasion was backed up by a PR offensive so layered and sophisticated that I even got an hysterical call today from a hedge fund manager in New York, screaming about an 'investor call' that Georgian Prime Minister Lado Gurgenidze made this morning with some fifty leading Western investment bank managers and analysts. I’ve since seen a J.P. Morgan summary of the conference call, which pretty much reflects the talking points later picked up by the US media.

These kinds of conference calls are generally conducted by the heads of companies in order to give banking analysts guidance. But as the hedge fund manager told me today, 'The reason Lado did this is because he knew the enormous PR value that Georgia would gain by going to the money people and analysts, particularly since Georgia is clearly the aggressor this time.' As a former investment banker who worked in London and who used to head the Bank of Georgia, Gurgenidze knew what he was doing. 'Lado is a former banker himself, so he knew that by framing the conflict for the most influential bankers and analysts in New York, that these power bankers would then write up reports and go on CNBC and argue Lado Gurgenidze’s talking points. It was brilliant, and now you’re starting to see the American media shift its coverage from calling it Georgia invading Ossetian territory, to the new spin, that it’s Russian imperial aggression against tiny little Georgia.'

The really scary thing about this investor conference call is that it suggests real planning. As the hedge fund manager told me, 'These things aren’t set up on an hour’s notice.' Where this war is leading is impossible to say, but as Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Chechnya, have shown, wars have a funny way of lasting longer, costing more in money and lives, and snuffing out whatever individual liberties the affected populations may have. As good as this war is for Saakashvili, who has become increasingly unpopular at home and abroad, or for McCain, whose poll numbers seem to rise every time the plaque devours another lobe of his brain, it also bodes well for the resurgent Prime Minister Putin, who seems to have become increasingly peeved with his hand-picked successor, President Dmitry Medvedev’s flickering independence and his liberalizer shtick. There’s nothing like a good war to snuff out an uppity sois-disant liberal who’s getting in your way–even McCain, frozen in an antiperspirant-induced fog, can still grasp this basic reptilian concept."

The FARC: fish with plenty of fresh water

The Continuity of FARC-EP Resistance in Colombia by James J. Brittain

This article puts recent media reports about the diminished strength and flagging spirits of Colombia's FARC rebels in perspective: reminding the reader first of all that many of these reports are issued by the Colombian government, and secondly that the FARC have faced far worse situations in the past. For instance, "[i]n 1973, the Colombian state, with the assistance of the United States, launched 'Operation Anori', which resulted in the destruction of much of the FARC-EP’s military supplies and sections of its leadership ... After this and other counterinsurgency campaigns took place during the early-mid 1970s, it was documented that the FARC-EP had lost seventy percent of its ammunitions with as little as one-hundred-fifty armed and trained combatants remaining." Yet the FARC re-grouped and gained strength.

In contrast to the conventional wisdom of an immanent FARC collapse, the article documents a number of impressive military actions occurring this very year. "Between the 29th of April and the 6th of May the FARC-EP carried out a coordinated series of attacks which isolated sectors of Colombia’s largest oil pipeline and subsequently halted the production of an estimated eight-hundred thousand to three-million barrels of oil. In addition, the guerrilla strategically destroyed important transportation routes needed to control the flow of oil and military supplies throughout various departments in the north of the country. Destroying an essential bridge near Catatumbo in the department of César, the FARC-EP was able to severe [sic] the movement of state and private security forces thereby keeping existing military units preoccupied (Weinberg, 2008). Following the offence, another Front in Norte de Santander pursued an aggressive attack against security forces guarding the 770 kilometre Colombian-based Ecopetrol and US-based Occidental Petroleum owned Caño-Limón pipeline near Tibu – the true target of the attack. Ironically, all this took place just a few short hours after William Brownfield, the United States’ Ambassador to Colombia, visited the area and applauded the growth in security and economic progress as a result of the FARC-EP’s so-called decline (Reuters, 2008a). In response to the FARC-EP’s strike, Colombian General Paulino Coronado coordinated a mounted offensive on 3rd of May to eliminate the FARC-EP attack and resume the flow of oil production. The guerrilla quickly eliminated the deployed battalion and continued their assault on the pipeline facilities for an additional forty-eight hours (Associated Press, 2008). Showing that their campaign targeting the Caño-Limón pipeline was not simply a one-time tactical success, the FARC-EP carried out an additional attack on Colombia’s largest coal mine – the Cerrejón – on the forty-fourth anniversary of insurgency’s inception."

The reason for the disparity between the FARC's continued military successes and the media-propagated conventional wisdom of FARC disintegration? It's structural: the Colombian state, along with its powerful U.S. ally, is dominating the public relations battle; how else do you think the ideas you have about Colombia originate? That there are lots of dispassionate reporters in Colombia monitoring the situation and sending accurate ideas about Colombian reality to the United States for dissemination? Not with the predominant trend in newspapers being widespread fat-trimming in the form of eliminating foreign bureaus. No, if the Colombian government is not populated entirely by idiots - and I don't think so, I'm a Unitedstatesian exceptionalist in this regard - then they've learned to deal with the media.

And that means basically driving to press offices, bringing food and visiting the landlord to pay the rent. Then the state PR flacks spoon-feed the one emaciated "reporter" who has to man the entire foreign bureau a salable story for the paper's consumers to consume. No, wait, wrong business model. It's to attract human eyeballs with brains attached to the paper so that they can be sold to the actual consumer, advertisers and their industrial and financial clients, to consume. In a gesture to credibility, the state PR goon perhaps flashes a government ID - aha, an official source! Then the ideas embodied in the story get shipped off to the U.S., where people infect themselves and others with them. This is how your ideas of Colombia - and so many other things - are made. Makes you wish you'd instead been on a tour of a health code nightmare sausage factory after weeks of continuous feasting on its products.

So while many of the ideas in your head that form your picture of Colombia are the product of government public relations flackery - and as such, by definition, have at best a troublesome correlation with reality - in Colombia the actual country the ever-present and, if anything, only intensifying disparity between rich and poor guarantees a solid base for FARC recruitment. As in Mao's analogy, the people are the water in which fish - the guerillas - swim. The Colombian and Unitedstatesian governments have unwittingly ensured that the rural poor are kept in a state where they will provide a solid base for the FARC for years to come.

"While it cannot be dismissed that in the past few months the FARC-EP has experienced unprecedented difficulties it must be realized that as long as inequitable sociocultural and political-economic conditions pervade Colombian society so too will a base from which the FARC-EP can recruit. The FARC-EP remain the longest running and most powerful political-military movement in contemporary Latin America with numbers still ranging in the thousands, arguably tens of thousands. Therefore, to buy into any suggestion that Colombia finds itself in a period of increased stability or that the FARC-EP have past [sic] into the annals of history is to adopt a false consciousness of the realities that exist within this Andean country....

'The internal struggle within Colombia is far from over. It will continue to be waged through radical and antagonistic forms. As the United States and the Uribe administration continue to engage a war against the poor so too will they exacerbate and intensify 'Colombia’s internal conflict by robbing families of their livelihoods and leaving them with little option but to join the left-wing guerrillas, particularly the FARC.'"