Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 115
April 4, 2018
Remembering the real – and radical – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Credit: AP)
It has been 50 years since Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot as he stood on the balcony outside room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. He had traveled there to support sanitation workers on strike after years of mistreatment and poor wages. King was just 39 years old.
As the founding president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a Nobel laureate, King was certainly famous in his lifetime. But since his assassination, King’s persona has become a phenomenon. He is remembered as the greatest civil rights leader in history and in many mainstream and liberal circles for his philosophy of nonviolence.
Politicians across the aisle feel at ease quoting King, most especially to advocate for blind love disguised as inaction — a dangerous misinterpretation of King’s work and legacy. Not only was King deeply radical in his fight against both racial and economic injustice, but he was far from passive. And, in line with the way America treats black activists, he was surveilled, targeted and harassed, accordingly.
Further, the sweeping reverence for King now, is a shift from when he was alive — certainly a byproduct of his vision being both sanitized and whitewashed. In August 1966, during the final years of his life, King had an approval rating of 33 percent, according to Gallup. Forty-five years later, that rating had risen to be 94 percent positive.
Of course, King should be widely celebrated. But just as James Earl Ray stole his life, the flattening of King’s work and perspective is theft, too — this time of his intellectual property and labor. As Jesse Jackson recently wrote in the New York Times, “We owe it to Dr. King — and to our children and grandchildren — to commemorate the man in full: a radical, ecumenical, antiwar, pro-immigrant and scholarly champion of the poor who spent much more time marching and going to jail for liberation and justice than he ever spent dreaming about it.”
Ending de jure segregation in the Jim Crow-era South was just one part of his activism. Toward the end of his life, “King was exceedingly unpopular in the U.S. because of his focus on fighting poverty, standing against militarism, empowering working-class people and the poor, and struggling against housing segregation in Northern cities,” Salon’s Chauncey DeVega writes. “The radical King — as opposed to the sanitized and literally whitewashed public figure who is celebrated during Black History Month and embraced on his public holiday — was a radical leftist who strongly opposed the excesses of capitalism and suspected that White America could not be rehabilitated from its racism.”
And years before his assassination, King was wary of the stance of white moderates in the north, who supported civil rights as long as it didn’t interrupt their own lives and as long as the methods to seek equal rights were not too inconvenient or disorderly and legal — no matter how unjust the laws on the books continued to be.
In his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King wrote:
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens’ Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
This is the same letter oft-quoted today by the very people whom King describes above. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he wrote in the fourth paragraph of a nearly 7,000 word letter, which is now one of his most iconic and exhausted phrases. (The sheer contradiction of those who chide young activists in the Black Lives Matter movement for blocking highways while plucking and sharing out-of-context King quotes is truly remarkable.) In this same letter, King amended his approach as “nonviolent direct action.”
As King neared the end of his life, he focused on his opposition to the Vietnam War and tackling the widening gap between the rich and poor. “This project gradually took the form not of simply a march but of the extensive Poor People’s Campaign and mobilization to culminate in an encampment in the shadow of the Washington Memorial,” William Pepper wrote in “The Plot to Kill King.” “The projection was for the establishment of a tent city with five hundred thousand of the nation’s poorest and most alienated citizens. They would remain as long as it took to get action from the Congress.” The campaign was scheduled for the spring of 1968, but King would not live to see it.
As the decades mount from King’s assassination and the people who knew him intimately get older, it is more important than ever to return to his writings in full to combat the distortion of his words and life. A misremembering of his legacy is a grave disservice to his radical commitment to freedom and equality — an agenda he was murdered for.
Fifty years from his death, King’s vision continues to be relevant, as the wealth gap is greater than ever, schools remain largely segregated and unequal and the criminal system justice sinks its teeth into black and brown communities.
In King’s final speech, on April 3 in Memphis, Tenn., he said: “Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same: ‘We want to be free.'”
Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, the GRU and the stealing of the presidency
Roger Stone, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort (Credit: Getty/AP/Salon)
Right from the beginning of the Trump-Russia story, there were two big questions to be answered: If it was true that the Trump campaign and Russians got together,what were the goals of the two sides? And if they engaged in “collusion,” as it came to be called, how did it work?
We have had the answer to the first question almost from the day of Trump’s inauguration, when Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn was fired for lying about his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The Russians wanted sanctions lifted that had been imposed by the Obama administration after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Crimea. The Trump campaign sought help from the Russians getting their man elected.
As to the second question, for a long time, all we knew about were a bunch of fairly high-level contacts between Trump’s people and Kislyak. But if you’re going to conspire with a foreign power to steal an election, you don’t do it through their ambassador. We are now seeing the outlines of how the conspiracy worked below the surface of the campaign.
That’s why the sentencing yesterday of Alex van der Zwaan to 30 days in jail and a $20,000 fine is a much bigger deal than it seems. While the sentence for lying to investigators from Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller may seem like a slap on the wrist, van der Zwaan points us in the direction of contacts in 2016 between the Trump campaign and agents of the GRU, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian Armed Forces.
According to the indictment brought by Mueller, Van der Zwaan, a London-based lawyer for the New York City-based international law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, was charged with lying about when he was in contact with Trump deputy campaign manager Rick Gates and “Person A,” who has been identified as Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a former agent of the GRU.
Van der Zwaan eventually admitted to Muller’s agents that Gates told him Kilimnik was a former GRU agent, and he produced an email from Kilimnik which revealed that Kilimnik had told him “the official contract was only part of the iceberg” that could get him, Gates, and Manafort in a lot of trouble.
Van der Zwaan at first appeared to be another one of these marginal figures like George Papadopoulos who have repeatedly popped up in the Trump-Russia investigation. But in order to understand where he fits into what is now beginning to be recognized as a conspiracy by the Russian state to aid the campaign of Donald Trump, it’s necessary to go back to the summer of 2016 and have a look at the intensity of what was going on.
The Russians were very busy. Guccifer 2.0, was already releasing emails from the Democratic National Committee that had been hacked by Russian intelligence. We know now that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian intelligence agent. As the Daily Beast recently reported, the Guccifer 2.0 had failed to mask his location before logging on one day, and “working off the IP address, U.S. investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency’s headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow.”
Despite the fact that a Russian hacker working for the GRU was already releasing Democratic party emails, the Trump campaign jumped at the chance to cooperate with Russians connected to the GRU. In early June, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner took control of all of the campaign’s digital operations and hired Cambridge Analytica to help with their efforts. Cambridge Analytica immediately sent a team of its experts to San Antonio, Texas, to help the Trump digital operation. Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, sent an email to Julian Assange offering his help in organizing the release of emails from the Democratic National Committee. Julian Assange had received the hacked Democratic emails from the GRU.
On June 9, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort met in Trump Tower with three Russians, including the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who had contacts with Russian intelligence. The meeting was to discuss “information that would incriminate Hillary Clinton” that the Russians were bringing from the Crown Prosecutor of Russia.
In early July, Manafort sent an email using his campaign email account to Konstantin V. Kilimnik, the Russian national who was known to him as a former GRU agent. Manafort offered, through Kilimnik, to brief Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska on what the Trump campaign was doing. “If he needs private briefings, we can accommodate,” Manafort said. Deripaska, known to be close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, had had business dealings with Manafort for more than a decade. When Donald Trump hired Paul Manafort as his campaign chairman, he was opening a direct conduit to the Kremlin and the GRU.
Also in early July, Trump campaign adviser Carter Page traveled to Moscow where he met with the deputy prime minister of Russia and a major figure from Roseneft, the Russian state-owned oil company. All deals between American oil companies such as Exxon and Russian oil companies were and still are under sanction, putting on hold more than half a trillion dollars in deals. The Russians had a goal of seeing the sanctions lifted because they were causing so much damage to the Russian economy.
On July 14, with the Republican National Convention only days away, the Trump campaign succeeded in changing the so-called “Russia plank” in the party platform from being critical of Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory and Crimea to being pro-Russian. Kilimnik would later brag that he was involved in the alteration of the platform to be pro-Russian.
Only July 18, Campaign adviser Jeff Sessions met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the Republican National Convention. Also meeting with Kislyak were Carter Page and J.D. Gordon, a Trump campaign national security adviser.
On July 22, WikiLeaks released 20,000 Democratic party emails, giving the campaign of Hillary Clinton a huge headache in advance of its national convention.
On July 24, Paul Manafort — who had already met with Russians and was in regular contact with Konstantin Kilimnik — went on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and denied there were any contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians.
On July 27, candidate Donald Trump, in a campaign rally press conference, came right out and invited Russia to hack the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said. The mention of the nation of Russia by candidate Trump was very strange at that time, since there was no public knowledge that Russian intelligence was behind the hacked Democratic emails released by Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks, and the Trump campaign was denying across the board any contacts with Russians. In fact, this may have been the only mention of the word “Russia” by Trump during the entire campaign, except to deny that there were any contacts with Russians or Russia.
On August 2, back in New York, Paul Manafort had a meeting at Trump Tower with Konstantin Kilimnik. Earlier on the same day, a private jet owned by Oleg Deripaska landed at Newark Airport in New Jersey. The jet spent less than 24 hours on the ground and departed for Moscow. It is not known whether Kilimnik traveled on the Deripaska jet. CNN reported that on August 4, Roger Stone appeared with Alex Jones on his “InfoWars” show and predicted that “devastating” material on Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation would soon be published by WikiLeaks. According to the Wall Street Journal, on that date he also emailed his friend Sam Nunberg, telling him he had had dinner with Julian Assange in London (Special Prosecutor Mueller is reportedly looking into both claims by Stone, according to the Journal).
On August 5, Roger Stone wrote an article for Breitbart claiming that Guccifer 2.0 had nothing to do with Russia. Stone gave a speech on August 8, claiming that he was “in touch” with Julian Assange.
On August 12, Stone announced that WikiLeaks would release more damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Also on August 12, a large batch of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) emails and documents were released by Stone’s correspondent, Guccifer 2.0, the agent working for the GRU in Moscow.
On August 15, Guccifer 2.0 released more DCCC documents. Also on that date, Guccifer 2.0 communicated with Stone through his Twitter account. The next day, Stone sent a message back to Guccifer 2.0.
On August 19, after a report in the Washington Post exposed millions of dollars in payments from a Ukrainian political party to Paul Manafort, he resigned as campaign chairman of the Trump campaign.
But the Russian agents of the GRU were not finished. They continued to leak Democratic Party documents and emails to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks continued to release them to the press. Guccifer 2.0 released more documents on August 21. On August 22, the GRU agent sent dozens of documents to a Republican party operative in Florida about the Democrat’s plans to get out the vote in that state. On August 26, Roger Stone told Breitbart Radio that WikiLeaks would be releasing even more Democratic party emails. Also on that date, according to the Wall Street Journal, Republican Party mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, who was one of the original investors in Cambridge Analytica, sent an email to CEO Alexander Nix suggesting that the Trump campaign could help WikiLeaks index the Clinton emails and make them “more searchable.” Nix later admitted that he contacted Julian Assange with the offer, but claimed that he was rejected.
On August 31, Guccifer 2.0 released emails hacked from Nancy Pelosi’s personal computer.
In early September, deputy Trump campaign manager Rick Gates contacted Alex van der Zwaan and told him to contact Konstantin Kilimnik. This is the conversation Van der Zwaan would later lie about and for which he was sentenced to prison.
On September 8, Jeff Sessions met again with Sergey Kislyak, this time in his Senate Office. Sessions would later lie to the United States Senate about this and other meetings with Kislyak, denying that he or anyone else on the Trump campaign had contact with Russians.
On September 9, Guccifer 2.0 sent Roger Stone a link to a blog with information about Democratic party plans for voter turnout. Stone replied to Guccifer with the assessment, “pretty standard.”
On September 15, Guccifer 2.0 released more DCCC emails.
On September 20 and 21, WikiLeaks contacted Donald Trump Jr. privately on Twitter with information about an anti-Trump organization that was being established called “putintrump.org.” WikiLeaks sends him a private password to the site. Within a few hours, private information about the people behind putintrump.org was posted on social media, including names, phone numbers, and home addresses.
On September 23, Guccifer 2.0 released more DCCC emails.
On October 2, five days ahead of the release of the emails of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, Roger Stone predicted that WikiLeaks would soon release more Democratic party emails. “Wednesday @HillaryClinton is done,” Stone tweeted.
On October 4, Guccifer 2.0 released documents hacked from the Clinton Foundation.
Throughout the month of October, WikiLeaks continued to communicate with Donald Trump Jr. through private messages on Twitter. One message stated: “Hey Donald, great to see you and your dad talking about our publications. Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if he mentions us.” The message ended with “Btw we just released Podesta emails part 4.”
On October 12, Roger Stone bragged to NBC News “I have a back channel with WikiLeaks.”
As of today, Paul Manafort is under multiple indictments by Special Counsel Mueller, including charges of bank fraud and money laundering dating to the time he was in business with Konstantin Kilimnik in Kiev, Ukraine. Deputy campaign manager Rick Gates was also indicted for the same crimes. He pled guilty to lesser charges and is cooperating with the Special Counsel. Alex van der Zwaan pled guilty to perjury and was sentenced yesterday for lying about contacts with both Gates and Kilimnik. George Papadopoulos pled guilty to lying to the Special Counsel and is cooperating. Mueller’s investigators are looking into Roger Stone’s contacts with Guccifer 2.0 and Julian Assange.
Mueller’s team indicted 13 Russian citizens and three Russian companies for defrauding the United States and subverting the election of 2016. The office of the Special Counsel is known to be investigating Guccifer 2.0 and the Russian intelligence agents of the GRU behind the hacking of the DNC, DCCC, and Podesta emails and their release through WikiLeaks.
CIA Director Mike Pompeo, recently named Secretary of State by President Trump, last year called WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “a fraud and a coward,” in a speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” Pompeo said in the speech.
“[Pompeo] said Russia’s GRU military intelligence service used Wikileaks to distribute material hacked from Democratic National Committee computers during the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” Reuters reported.
On October 10, 2016, at a Pennsylvania campaign rally, then candidate Donald Trump joyfully announced, “I love WikiLeaks!” He would go on to talk about how much he loved WikiLeaks more than 130 times between October 10 and election day on November 7. Now that Special Counsel Mueller has confirmed that the President of the United States is and has been a “subject” of the investigation, Trump is going to regret how much he loved WikiLeaks, as the investigation closes in on the connections of his campaign to what we now know were agents of the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU. The days until Trump moves on to the next step and becomes a “target” of Mueller are growing shorter and shorter.
You are no Carrie Bradshaw
Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw in "Sex and the City 2" (Credit: New Line Cinema)
I don’t care how many pairs of high heels you have in your closet. I don’t care how often you sit in bars with your girlfriends offering emotional support over cocktails. I don’t care how cute you think your dating anecdotes are. You’re not Carrie. Nor you should ever aspire to be. Because girl, we all know that Carrie is awful.
A much hate-shared Washington Post piece this week on dating Jewish men served as a poignant reminder that no woman ever improves in anybody’s estimation by comparing herself to the heroine of “Sex and the City.” “And while I try not to look back after a relationship ends, to go full-on Carrie Bradshaw,” the unfortunate author opined, “I couldn’t help but wonder if this was not just a coincidence but a pattern I should pay attention to.” Considering that the author evoked the fictional figure in another piece just five months ago, I’d say we have a bigger troubling pattern to pay attention to.
Carrie’s terribleness is an accepted element of her character. Two years ago, Babe decreed that “Carrie Bradshaw is the worst.” How bad is she, precisely? We can count the ways. Ireland’s Evoke mag has come up with “10 times Carrie was the worst friend EVER in Sex and the City.” Elle found “16 Things About Carrie Bradshaw That Are the Worst.” Buzzfeed discovered “21 Reasons Carrie Bradshaw Is Actually Really Annoying.” And Stylecaster, going for top honors, found a whopping “35 Reasons I Think Carrie Bradshaw Is Kind of an A-Hole.” The “kind of” is being generous. Even Sarah Jessica Parker herself has called Carrie “childish.”
Carrie’s ascension to aspirational figure is as baffling as it is persistent. Personally, as a white lady Manhattan writer with unruly hair and a dating history informed by my unresolved father issues, I do understand that Carrie possesses a certain degree of reliability, even for women whose lifestyles are more Payless than Manolo. I also know that fictional characters don’t have to be perfect, or even likable, as Candace Bushnell’s creation indisputably proves. Carrie smokes, oversleeps, hooks up with the wrong guys and gets splashed by passing busses. Who doesn’t, AM I RIGHT, LADIES? Yet she also has an expensive wardrobe, hangs out all the time with loving friends, goes to great parties and ultimately lands a rich husband. She offers the promise that you can be messy and seemingly fabulous, irresponsible yet taken care of, a sex writer and still safely vanilla. In other words, yes, she’s a familiar type. And if Carrie at her height had been on Twitter, she’d definitely have had a lively feed.
But it’s one thing to be entertained by a character; it’s another to think she somehow represents lifestyle goals. Let me tell you how bad Carrie is, because I’ve seen every episode. She is, by her own admission, emotionally slutty. She made Big’s heart condition and Samantha’s cancer all about her. She guilt tripped Charlotte into helping her pay for her condo so she wouldn’t suffer the indignity of moving to… Weehawken. (I am still so angry about this. You were right the first time, Charlotte.) She cheated on her boyfriend while he was stripping her floors. She lives in New York yet only hangs out with other straight, well-to-do white women. She has one gay friend, who serves mainly as her adorable sidekick. She rarely ventures outside of her comfortable zone of race, class, gender and identity. She’s the kind of person who waits to have a boyfriend to do things like go to Paris. She proudly describes herself as “untamed,” like a beautiful horse, but she can’t handle the Catskills. She can’t even handle Staten Island. And yes, the world is full of women just like her. They are awful. Also, every single snippet from Carrie’s successful newspaper column is just hideous, hideous writing, by the way.
Yet two decades after she first donned that iconic tutu, a certain patrician breed of women are still looking at Carrie and seeing themselves — favorably. The West Village stoop that served as her television front steps is a tourist destination, a shrine where young women regularly flock to gawk at the same place she once stubbed her cigarettes. Instagram is full of photos tagged with #carriebradshaw — images of shoes, cocktails and smiling white women who quote Carrie’s wisdom to “Fall in love with yourself first.” Because nobody has internalized the message to love yourself first quite as skillfully as the woman who fancies herself a Carrie.
Most of us have learned since the nineties that not all the hijinks of Jerry and George and Elaine and Kramer have aged well. We accept that Ross and Rachel were pretty toxic together. But Carrie, despite being an acknowledged literal nightmare, still holds a titanium grip on her ever renewing population of acolytes. She continues to validate a particular kind of female — that blissfully un self-actualized woman who believes kissing another girl makes for a wild night, that her besties are amazing but anyone younger and prettier is the enemy, that consumerism is a sign of discernment rather than shallowness, and that everything she has attained through exhorbitant privilege was instead earned through talent and effort. She’s not a role model; she’s Ivanka Trump with a curling iron. So if you think you’re a Carrie, please, be something else instead. Be that other woman, boldly walking down the street with her head held high, wondering why those four obnoxious, self-absorbed ladies have to take up the whole damn sidewalk.
Trump prepares to deploy National Guard troops to Mexican border
A section of the US/Mexico border fence. (Credit: Getty/AP/Photo Montage by Salon)
One day after President Donald Trump warned that his administration was “going to be doing things militarily,” Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced on Wednesday that National Guard troops would be deployed to the U.S.-Mexico border.
“The president has directed that the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security work together with our governors to deploy the National Guard to our southwest border,” Nielsen said. Trump is expected to sign a proclamation to officiate the order.
“It’s our expectation that the National Guard will deploy personnel in support of CBP’s border security mission,” Nielsen said, adding that plans were still being “finalized.” The secretary said she would not “provide the full details” yet.
The announcement follows Trump’s remarks during a recent meeting with visiting Baltic leaders, in which he claimed that he had been speaking with Secretary of Defense James Mattis about “doing things militarily.”
“Until we can have a wall and proper security, we’re going to be guarding our border with the military, Trump said at the White House on Tuesday. “That’s a big step. We really haven’t done that before — or certainly not very much before.”
Then followed a string of events on Twitter, where Trump has been actively ranting about delivering his campaign promise of stricter border control. The president asserted there was a heightened for doing so after reports surfaced that a “caravan” of migrants from Honduras was traveling through Mexico.
The story had been reported by Trump’s media outlet of choice, Fox News. The caravan is, in fact, an annual event to raise awareness about the growing refugee crisis in Central America.
On Wednesday, Nielsen added that she did not want to “get ahead” of the state governors, who would have a heavy say in the deployment of troops.
But the secretary said that the deployment would be similar to past executive actions. “It will be strong,” she said. “It will be as many as needed to fill the gaps today.”
Indeed, this would not be the first time that the National Guard has been deployed to the southern border. In 2010, then-President Barack Obama’s administration sent 1,200 National Guardsmen to support Homeland Security’s CBP and ICE amid heightened concerns about drug trafficking. President George W. Bush deployed 6,000 guardsmen to the border from 2006 to 2008. It reportedly cost a total of $1.2 billion, according to CNN.
Trump teased the news earlier Wednesday on Twitter, falsely claiming that Democrats wanted foreign citizens to “pour” into the U.S. without any immigrations safeguards.
“Our Border Laws are very weak while those of Mexico & Canada are very strong. Congress must change these Obama era, and other, laws NOW! The Democrats stand in our way — they want people to pour into our country unchecked….CRIME! We will be taking strong action today,” he tweeted.
Our Border Laws are very weak while those of Mexico & Canada are very strong. Congress must change these Obama era, and other, laws NOW! The Democrats stand in our way – they want people to pour into our country unchecked….CRIME! We will be taking strong action today.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 4, 2018
Advocacy groups immediately responded to the news, calling attention to the potentially disruptive effect troops could have on border communities.
“In Texas, those who live along the border already have to worry about Border Patrol and ICE,” Mario Carrillo, director of America’s Voice Texas, said in a statement.
“Now, they will have to worry about the National Guard patrolling their streets, as if they were in a war zone,” Carrillo continued. “For those who live along the border, our communities aren’t a setting for the latest episode of President Trump’s reality show, but are places where people live, work and collaborate with our brothers and sisters from the other side of the border.”
NRATV: YouTube caused “a lot of hatred” by censoring content
(Credit: NRATV)
A correspondent for NRATV, the digital video arm of the National Rifle Association, suggested that YouTube was to blame for Tuesday’s tragic shooting at its headquarters in San Bruno, California, because the company’s new policies brought about”a lot of hatred.”
The gun lobbyist group was the latest to join the chorus of rightwing voices who have been searching for a scapegoat following the latest mass shooting in America.
During a Wednesday broadcast, NRATV’s Chuck Holton said, “YouTube making these changes where they’re going from being a platform for videos to being a publisher of videos – meaning that they are starting to censor content here and there, whatever – actually opens them up to liability. And it opens them up to a lot of hatred from people around the world.”
The correspondent continued, “Bottom line is: As it turns out, this shooter was just pretty downright crazy even by California standards – and that’s saying something.”
Holton’s claims followed NRATV host Grant Stinchfield’s allegations that the left had united to blame the NRA for the shooting. “You and I were both very careful not to speculate about what happened,” Stinchfield said of the gun industry lobbyists’ coverage of the shooting on Tuesday.
“And yet, while we were being very careful, while we were asking questions and waiting for answers, the left was out there literally pushing this narrative that the shooting was somehow the NRA’s fault – and that I need to apologize for a tweet that NRATV sent out of one of my videos,” he continued.
The tweet in question, in which Stinchfield defended comments by the NRA’s Executive Director Chris Cox, and called for gun owners to “rise up” against “politically motivated censorship” was posted on March 27.
After @YouTube said it'll ban content related to the sale or assembly of #firearms or firearms accessories, @NRAILA's @ChrisCoxNRA released a statement slamming the move as political posturing. @stinchfield1776 agrees and says #NRA members must rise up in the face of censorship. pic.twitter.com/Zt7ZGKYl3p
— NRATV (@NRATV) March 27, 2018
Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, blasted the NRA on Twitter following the shooting. “Decency should dictate that the NRA remove this tasteless, incendiary tweet after the shooting,” she wrote, noting that the tweet was, in fact, still up.
Decency should dictate that the @NRA remove this tasteless, incendiary tweet after the shooting at the YouTube HQ. Of course it’s still up. https://t.co/X8M0Y8TKFI
— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) April 4, 2018
Instead, Stinchfield doubled down on his claims in a new video on Wednesday, in which he said the organization would not apologize “for encouraging our members to defend their rights.”
Stinchfield went on to make a false equivalency, claiming that if the “socialist left” was truly upset about the words “rise up” then there should have been the same outrage when Andra Day sang her hit song “Rise Up” at the Democratic National Convention during the 2016 election.
"A shooting at Youtube HQ and within minutes the anti-gun left is blaming the #NRA…to try and blame #NRATV’s condemnation–my condemnation–of Youtube’s decision to censor gun owners, for the actions of a Persian, vegan, animal rights activist, psychopath." –@stinchfield1776 pic.twitter.com/ZYvFewIyIg
— NRATV (@NRATV) April 4, 2018
“So hear me loud and clear, I will not apologize for defending freedom,” Stinchfield said. “And, as for the tyranny you so desperately wish to impose on all of us, I unapologetically declare right now that we will – and always will – rise up against it with our most powerful weapon: the truth.”
Watch the full segment via Media Matters for America below.
Why “Black Panther” is such a big deal for women
"Black Panther" (Credit: Disney/Marvel Studios)
Civil rights activist Marian Wright Edelman famously said, “It’s hard to be what you can’t see.” It’s a refrain used often by those of us lobbying for greater representation for women and people of color in Hollywood, and it’s something I experienced personally as a kid growing up in the ‘80s.
I was five when “The Empire Strikes Back” came out in theaters — prime cosplay time — and on the kindergarten playground, all anyone wanted to do was play Star Wars. While the boys duked it out over who would be Han and who would be Darth Vader and who would be Chewbacca, the girls more politely vied for the coveted role of Leia — the only female character in our entire imaginary play universe.
I couldn’t help but think back to that time of my life when images of the “Black Panther” opening weekend began to emerge on social media. My feed was flooded with photos and videos of women and girls dressed to the nines as Nakia (the Black Panther’s former lover and an undercover spy), as Okoye (his bodyguard and head of his special forces), as Shuri (his tech genius kid sister), as members of the Dora Milaje (the all-female palace guard), and as glamorous citizens of the Afrofuturistic utopia of Wakanda.
Even as a white woman, I wondered how my perception of myself and of my place in the dominant culture would have been changed if “Black Panther” had come out when I was growing up. Would having more than one character to look up to while caught up in America’s latest cinematic obsession have made me feel more like a part of the national narrative and less like a token or an outlier? And if so, how much would this sensation have been magnified if I were black?
To discuss these issues and more, my “Poptarts” podcast co-host Callie Watts and I invited BUST magazine culture writer Bry’onna Mention onto the show to talk about her experience of the film as a black feminist.
“There were whole groups of little girls getting together dressed as the Wakandan guards with spears and doing special dance routines, and seeing that, I ovulated,” I told Mention. “I just couldn’t even take it. How important is this cosplay element of Black Panther to kids and also to the broader culture?”
“I’m a grown-ass 27-year-old woman and it’s important to me,” she replied. “I didn’t have any of that growing up. Like, I could have been Snow White, I could have been Cinderella, but it was always like, ‘Oh, you’re the black version.’ I had nothing [to dress up as].”
“I think about when I was little and everyone was reading those damn ‘American Girl’ books, and all these white girls had all these time periods to explore, and they had Samantha and this one and that one,” she said. “Who did I have? Addy! She was fresh out of slavery and she was sneaking off to read. I was like, Geez! I like to read. This is not a fun time for me [to imagine]. I don’t want to be her!”
“Even with Disney growing up, I think every little black girl somehow identified with Nala from ‘The Lion King,’ and she’s a damn cat! She’s an animal,” Mention continued. “But there were no other Disney princesses remotely close to how I look. And then there’s Jasmine, but she’s not black, she’s just brown. She’s Southeast Asian, but her complexion was closer to mine than Cinderella’s so I was rockin’ with her.”
“So now, to see little girls have a variety of black women to choose from in one film — it’s like, I don’t even know who I’m going to be for Halloween this year! I have choices now! Whole choices. That movie was emotional for me. It was a lot. I think I cried within the first couple of moments. It was all I ever wanted and didn’t know that I needed and more.”
“I also got emotional,” I told Mention. “I was crying early on. I had this sense rushing through me that this is what movies would look like if Hollywood producers saw women and people of color as people and not props.”
“Yes,” Mention replied. “That one fact, that one statement says it all. They saw us as people.”
Listen to the rest of our feminist response to “Black Panther” on “Poptarts.”
Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play and on BUST’s website.
Madeleine Albright takes on fascism, warns about Trump
Madeleine Albright (Credit: AP/Zach Gibson)
For Madeleine Albright, fascism is personal.
The former Secretary of State fled authoritative leaders twice in life, first leaving Czechoslovakia with her family after the Nazi occupation in 1939. Later, she left Czechoslovakia for a second time during the rise of Communism. Now, she hopes to not have to flee fascism for the third time.
Perhaps that’s what motivated Albright to write her latest book, “Fascism: A Warning,” where she describes how authoritative leaders like Adolf Hitler rose to power, and examines how more modern democratic countries are turning to fascism today.
In an interview with National Public Radio’s Terry Gross for an episode of “Fresh Air,” Albright said she’s concerned about America’s democratic values under the leadership of President Donald Trump. While she doesn’t call him a fascist, she does refer to him as the “most anti-democratic leader we’ve had in modern history.”
“What he’s trying to do is undermine the press and [he] has disdain for the judiciary, and the electoral process and minorities, and I think that his instincts are not ones that are democratic,” Albright told Gross. “I am very concerned.”
Albright explained that the build-up of fascism can be a slow one.
“Part of the reason for writing [the book] is to say that, in fact, this can happen in countries that have democratic systems, that have a population that’s interested in what’s going on, that is supportive,” she said. “That’s what’s so worrisome, is that fascism can come in a way that it is one step at a time, and in many ways, goes unnoticed until it’s too late.”
Her solution is that people need to speak up and do something.
“I’ve picked up that phrase ‘see something, say something,’ and I am seeing some things that are the kinds of things that we have seen in other countries, and so I am saying not only should we say something, but we have to do something about it,” she said.
Gross asked Albright about her thoughts on how Trump has a habit of saying and tweeting things that aren’t true. She pointed to a Trump tweet from this past weekend, when he said, “These big flows of people are all trying to take advantage of DACA. They want in on the act!” Trump was referring to a reported caravan of refugees from Honduras, crossing the border in Mexico.
These big flows of people are all trying to take advantage of DACA. They want in on the act!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 1, 2018
As Gross pointed out, it would be impossible for those people to “take advantage of DACA” since it’s not 2007.
“What are your concerns when the President tweets or says something that isn’t just not true, but a lot of people hear or read him won’t know that?” Gross asked Albright.
“I have to say on the whole issue of DACA he has so many things wrong that I wonder whether he’s deliberately lying or whether he really doesn’t understand the issue,” Albright said.
Albright continued to explain how Trump is often quick to blame Democrats for DACA, to which she added this is the type of issue America should be worried about.
“I think people may disagree with the president of the opposing party … but we normally have believed that the president tells the truth,” Albright said. “And I know I’m very worried about the fact that there are deliberate ways of misstating the issue, and then the people think, ‘If the president said it, it must be right,’ when it’s just a deliberate untruth.”
Further dissecting some of Trump’s policies and rhetoric, when asked about NATO and Trump’s criticism of it, Albright said it’s an “unbelievable step backwards.”
“I do believe that the United States is stronger when we have friends and allies to deal with the various issues,” she said. “As a European who has spent her life in the United States, I see the Euro-Atlantic alliance as one of the most important bulwarks of our society, so seeing this go on, I find appalling. And what is the issue — again, it’s this lack of understanding of what this alliance is about.”
Albright’s warning and concerns are ones to be taken seriously, especially when separate analyses have suggested democracy is on the decline, too.
Indeed, data analyzed by Freedom House in January, a US-based think-tank suggested that democracy has faced its “most serious crisis in decades.” The report claimed various factors are at fault for democracy’s global decline, but it called out Trump’s rhetoric and policies, noting how they don’t position him as an advocate of democracy.
Was Trump exonerated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe?
Robert Mueller; Donald Trump (Credit: Getty/Alex Wong/AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
It has been revealed that, as of last month, President Donald Trump was only a “subject” of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 election – not a “target.” And Fox News is already spinning this new development as if the ongoing saga has at last concluded with the president’s name cleared.
Wait, Trump is completely off the hook? Or, at the very least, those who alleged there was something fishy about the president’s connections to Russia were wrong?
To be blunt: Definitely not, and probably not, respectively.
Nixon was not a “target” of the Watergate grand jury, but he became an un-indicted co-conspirator, and resigned before being impeached, tried and removed! This WaPo info is interesting but not very telling. https://t.co/7xKtoESIMk
— John Dean (@JohnWDean) April 4, 2018
What we learned over past week: Mueller is directly engaging with Trump's attys. Wants an intvw w/ POTUS. POTUS wants to do it. But many in Trump camp counseling him against doing so, worry he's just a *subject* now… but could risk becoming a *target,* if he's not careful.
— Robert Costa (@costareports) April 4, 2018
Trump's being investigated by Mueller for multiple crimes. Not being a criminal target of Mueller's means he isn't trying to indict Trump (yet). So any Trumper who gets celebratory about this is unhinged. This is the worst news I've ever heard for any president in my lifetime.
— Scott Dworkin (@funder) April 4, 2018
When someone is the subject of an investigation, it means that he or she has behaved in a manner that could constitute criminal conduct, but investigators believe there is not enough evidence to justify criminal charges, according to The Washington Post. This, in turn means that, while Trump has not yet become a named target of Mueller’s investigation, the special counsel is still in the process of accumulating evidence and could eventually reverse course.
One excerpt from the Post’s story is quite telling here:
The special counsel also told Trump’s lawyers that he is preparing a report about the president’s actions while in office and potential obstruction of justice, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations.
Mueller reiterated the need to interview Trump — both to understand whether he had any corrupt intent to thwart the Russia investigation and to complete this portion of his probe, the people said.
For all intents and purposes, Mueller seems to have decided that he needs to learn more about what Trump knew, when he knew it and whether any of his actions were criminal in nature. Mueller does not yet have enough evidence to prove that Trump committed a crime, but he has also not reached the point where he has decided to stop probing the president’s actions.
This appears to have Trump’s advisers worried, according to the Post. Although both Trump and some of his advisers have insisted that Mueller’s labeling of Trump as a subject means the president is unlikely to find himself in any legal hot water, other members of his political team have noted that subjects of investigations frequently do become indicted targets. They also pointed out that Mueller has made it clear he wants to interview Trump — and his decision to write up reports about the president all but requires him to do so — which would set him up for serious legal ramifications if he does not tell the truth under oath.
In fact, one person close to the discussions from Mueller’s investigation told the Post: “They’ve said they want to write a report on this — to answer the public’s questions — and they need the president’s interview as the last step.”
There is another dimension to Mueller’s decision not to designate Trump as a target of his investigation — one that exists specifically because he is president. As Josh Gerstein of Politico explained:
In Trump’s case, Mueller’s reported concession that Trump isn’t a target of the investigation may mean even less than in a more typical probe. That’s because Justice Department legal opinions issued in 1973 and 2000 say a sitting president cannot be indicted criminally while in office.
Mueller appears to have little option but to follow that legal guidance since he is generally bound to obey Justice Department policies.
Another important aspect to Mueller’s probe is that — as former FBI special agent Clint Watts of the Foreign Policy Research Institute wrote in The New York Times on Tuesday — “a standard Russian approach would have been to influence Mr. Trump through surrogates like Mr. Gates and Paul Manafort rather than through direct command through an individual — in this case, the candidate and then president.”
This is part of the Russian strategy of cultivating agents of influence by deploying “layers of surrogates and proxies offering business inducements, information or threatened reprisals that can individually be explained away by coincidence while masking the strings and guiding hands of the Kremlin’s puppet masters and their objectives.”
Regarding how this strategy would potentially impact Mueller’s approach to Trump, Watts wrote:
Evidence of Russia’s intent to interfere in the election is overwhelming, and documentation of Trump campaign members’ collusion not only exists but is growing. The special counsel’s investigation into collusion ultimately comes down to two questions. First, did President Trump or any member of his campaign willingly coordinate their actions with Russia? And did President Trump or any member of his campaign knowingly coordinate their action with Russia?
These questions have not been fully answered by any of the recent reports about the Mueller probe, and it is unlikely that Americans will learn of more conclusive findings in the foreseeable future. At the very least, though, we do know that these new revelations do not signal the beginning of the end.
The YouTube shooter seemed liberal, so conservatives are having a field day
Donald Trump Jr. (Credit: AP/Andrew Harnik)
When news broke that the alleged shooter at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California, was a foreign woman and an avid animal rights activist, it didn’t take long for the rightwing attacks on so-called liberal violence to be hurled.
To the surprise of no one, among the loudest voices was President Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.
The shooting left at least three people injured and the assailant, 39-year-old Nasim Najafi Aghdam, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. In the hours immediately afterwards, the younger Trump celebrated the fact that the shooter wasn’t another white guy, bashing People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and YouTube.
You think there’s any chance whatsoever that a mass shooters hateful Instagram and YouTube channels would be pulled immediately if they were NRA members as opposed to liberal Vegan PETA activists? Asking for a few million friends in the @NRA
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) April 4, 2018
So you’re saying not likely an @NRA member??? https://t.co/UqKUBb93pA
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) April 4, 2018
He also responded to a tweet and asserted that the left would “find a way” to blame “right-wing gun nuts” for the attack.
They will find a way. Just wait. https://t.co/NjQ9j9E1mj
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) April 4, 2018
Yup I look forward to the whole PETA has more mass shooters than the NRA conversations. I’m sure they will cover that… right? https://t.co/2taoidxApp
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) April 4, 2018
Trump also retweeted several posts by users who shared in his partisan attacks that accused the mainstream media of ignoring the shooting.
So the San Bruno YouTube HQ shooter was Female, foreign, a Vegan animal activist, off the rails mentally ill, didn't use an AR-15, and shot up a building in the strictest gun control state in America….how fast do you think the mainstream media is going to bury this? pic.twitter.com/oHnkSiolGv
— Mindy Robinson (@iheartmindy) April 4, 2018
The YouTube shooter was a @peta activist.
PETA IS A TERRORIST ORGANIZATION!
PETA IS A TERRORIST ORGANIZATION!
PETA IS A TERRORIST ORGANIZATION!
(That’s how this works now, right?)
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) April 4, 2018
Trump was not alone in his remarks, as GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, baselessly asserted that the attack may have been carried out by “an illegal immigrant.”
“You were going to discuss with me about sanctuary cities and the sanctuary state movement, and it fits right into what you’re talking about right now,” he said on Fox Business on Tuesday night.
“Would anyone be surprised?” he asked. “Would anyone listening to you right now say, ‘Well, this certainly wouldn’t be an illegal immigrant there.’ Well, it could be! Everybody knows that could be! . . . Sanctuary city ― my foot! We should be making sure we emphasize that any illegal in this state should be sent back whether he’s a criminal or not, but especially criminals.”
Ultraconservative firebrand Ann Coulter also made a connection to immigration as a whole in her response to the incident.
Report: YouTube shooting "had no known connection to terrorism," govt officials said. But it had a big, fat connection to immigration, i.e. govt policies that could be changed.
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) April 4, 2018
Aghdam’s family has since confirmed she had held a grudge against YouTube, and that in recent weeks she had expressed outrage over her videos being de-monetized, which means that advertisements would not be run on her content.
“She was angry,” Aghdam’s father said in an interview with to The San Jose Mercury News. Her family, from San Diego, reported she was missing to authorities on March 31. Aghdam was an avid social media user, and several videos depicted angst and discontent with YouTube.
The newspaper elaborated:
Aghdam was prolific on social media, posting videos and photos on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. Her YouTube channel included strange workout video clips, graphic animal abuse videos and vegan cooking tutorials. But recent posts show evidence of her growing frustration.
[…]
On a March 18 Instagram post, she railed at YouTube: “All my youtube channels got filtered by youtube so my videos hardly get views and it is called “merely relegation.” This is also happening to many other channels on youtube. This is the peaceful tactic used on the internet to censor and suppress people who speak the truth and are not good for the financial, political … gains of the system and big businesses. I recently got filtered on instagram too and maybe its related to youtube and youtube staff asked instagram to filter me here too!!?”
Authorities have not determined a clear motive at the moment, but are currently investigating websites of hers, CNN reported. Aghdam did not have any sort of relationship with any of the three people she shot.
The Coca-Cola invasion is causing Mexico’s slow death by junk food
(Credit: AP Photo/Jim Cole)
A new Coca-Cola-run shop opens roughly every eight hours in Mexico. But despite this full-scale corporate takeover of Mexico’s cities, towns and diet, most people believe the severe obesity and diabetes problems here are down to local culture and individual choices. They would be wrong.
A block and a half from where I live there’s an Oxxo, a corner store owned by Coca-Cola that stocks chips, biscuits, soft drinks, nachos, cigarettes, beer, bottled water and sweets. There are two more Oxxos two and four blocks to the west, and another one a few blocks to the south. With predictable stock, bill-paying facilities and open 24 hours, even the most health-conscious and anti-consumerist people go to an Oxxo a few days a week.
The Coca-Cola colonization
Oxxos have grown from 300 shops in Mexico in 1990 to nearly 16,000, and FEMSA (Coca-Cola) claims it serves 10 million people a day. Ironically, in addition to its chain of retail service stations, and its real estate division which aids the block-by-block colonization, FEMSA also has a health division which includes four pharmacy chains, acquired in 2013 and 2015. The Oxxos stock their own brands, including Heineken beer (minority owner) and Santa Clara milk. Together with the 400,000 other corner shops around the country — which also stock Coca-Cola and focus exclusively on junk food — the Oxxos are a saturation strategy that makes no-nutritious fake-food the easiest product or service to obtain.
Reinforcing that is the growth in chain restaurants at twice that of independent ones, and the massive informal workforce that buy junk food at wholesale prices and sell it outside stations, at bus stops and on buses, throughout the streets, at schools, in plazas and parks, and outside hospitals. Many of the street food vendors get supplies like cheese, mayonnaise and ground beef from Walmart’s Sam’s Club.
This fake-food colonization is bolstered by aggressive marketing strategies where products are packaged with pictures of colorful natural foods, though little real food is left in them, and absurdly, U.S. brands are associated with high quality. A McDonald’s burger costs around double the price of a street vendor’s burger, and brands like Snickers cost double that of the local equivalent.
Though in 2014 the Mexican government banned junk food advertising during children’s television shows at certain times, there is still an intense campaign aimed at getting children addicted early — on the internet, radios, and in newspapers and billboards, with mascots a common technique to develop a child’s emotional connection to a food, and half of all advertising offering a gift or linking to a website where kids can play games with the personalities and products.
At the end of last year, multinationals participated in a forum called Mercakids in Mexico, where they analyzed how to better reach children. Participants included Kidzania, a company that uses games to plant brands in the minds of kids, and Bonafont, which has a line of kids’ drinks that are full of sugar and artificial coloring.
The U.S. and multinationals are dumping their junk food in Mexico
This Coca-Cola and mass-junk food distribution was facilitated by NAFTA, an agreement that came into effect in 1994. It allows the U.S. to send its junk food here, while the U.S. imports tomatoes, chilies, cucumbers, limes, avocados, mangoes, and more from Mexico. In the 1990s, NAFTA meant that Mexican family farms couldn’t compete with the U.S. agricultural giants, and five million Mexican farmers were displaced into the cities. It was a forced conversion of sorts, where U.S. fast food restaurants and corporations that specialize in selling cheap poison in pretty packets were given even more room to take Mexican resources and run the show. U.S. investment into Mexican food companies also escalated from US$2.3 billion before NAFTA to $10.2 billion in 2012.
Mexico also became Walmart World: from Walmart-owned and -run pharmacies and food distributors, to its smaller Aurrera supermarkets and its sprawled drab department stores, Walmart is now Mexico’s largest food retailer. Its billion-dollar purchase of Cifra in 1997, under NAFTA’s foreign investment guidelines, was a major part of converting Mexico’s distinctive streets into mall-land and its diet into mall-diet.
The transnationals don’t understand that Mexico is corn
Before the era of a bacon-wrapped hot dog and Coca-Cola for breakfast, there was corn.
“Corn is Nanj jm’e, which means mother provider,” Andres Martinez Garcia tells me. He is a Mazatec artist and art restorer who grew up in the community of San Andres Hidalgo, in Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, where 82.5 percent of the population speak an indigenous language, and only 3 percent of the buildings have internet.
“Our ancestors learned to domesticate corn around 8,000-12,000 years ago. Experimenting, they found they could use its leaves and kernels to make all sorts of things and food. The process of growing and using corn taught us to organize, and corn was also the start of science, for us — observation and theories. Without corn we wouldn’t have developed as we did, we wouldn’t be who we are. So for us, it means history, identity, life, science, culture, and organization. It is a way of life, and a way of coordinating with the land and the gods,” Martinez said.
For many indigenous Mexicans especially, corn is like a flag. It’s a “living identity.… We are no one without it,” Martinez explained.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t taken into account when NAFTA was signed, nor are any transnationals concerned about what Mexico’s indigenous people need, or about their land that they are taking for themselves.
“Now, our corn comes from overseas. Most of it is transgenic. That’s the impact of these transnationals: you buy from them, and they give you their worst food. They don’t respect the rights of life and they don’t care that there’s a ritual behind the corn. They just want a product that makes them more powerful, gives them money,” Martinez said.
From a diet of corn, beans and zucchini to a forced dependence on rubbish
Today, Mexicans come fourth in the world for the amount of highly processed food they eat per person, at 212 kilos per year. According to Kantar WorldPanel, Mexican families or households spent 30 percent of their expenses on junk food in 2014, with the lower and middle classes spending the highest proportion. This sort of diet is a recent change, and not part of Mexican culture, as many people assume.
“Before the Spanish invasion, the food we produced was healthy, organic and natural, and planted according to the climate, the time of year. The food system was part of a long ritual. Food wasn’t about stuff that came in packets. It — and the planting and harvesting — was a structure that life was organized around. Food wasn’t just something to satisfy you, it was a mental state,” Martinez said.
The Mexican indigenous food pyramid — known as the “sacred trinity” — revolved around three key foods: corn, beans and chili. Now, Martinez’s indigenous community consumes soft drinks, candy and other junk food, he says, as that is what is sold there. “We used to eat healthy food like beans, herbs, corn, and meat… but now people ask for pizza and hamburgers. If you serve them a plate of beans, they throw it out.”
Even in urban areas, the food Mexicans consume isn’t so much their choice or culture, but rather it is the result of the lack of variety provided by the transnationals and of exploitative work conditions. Mexicans work very long days, six to seven days a week. My neighbors, for example, sell clothes in the street from 9am to 8pm, seven days a week. These sorts of conditions make it hard to find the time to cook, and a low income means people seek high-carb and sugary foods that make them feel full and that are quick to consume and easy to buy.
People are converted to a corporate U.S. diet early. Children are going to school with just soft drink for breakfast, believing it will give them energy for the day. In one study, 59 percent of primary school kids in selected rural and indigenous communities were consuming soft drinks at least three times a day, with coffee as their next most common drink, and the traditional and more nutritious atole only coming in fourth. The coffee is usually instant Nescafe, rather than from locally grown coffee beans. Most schools sell fried food and sweets, but provide no or few healthy food options, and soft drinks have become part of the family in these communities. Coca-Cola is the preferred drink, to the point where offering a guest a Pepsi is almost insulting.
Researchers found it was the corner stores in the communities making the difference, as they have shifted from selling fruit and vegetables to junk food over the last decade, with most of these stores also covered in Coca-Cola advertising and merchandise. In schools, such advertising is prohibited, but Coca-Cola finds ways to “sponsor” sports courts, decorating them in its brand’s colors, and in one example school, the unsubtle text “hydrate after exercising.”
The great profits from selling junk food to the poor
Mexico is facing a serious health crisis, with diabetes claiming 80,000 lives a year. That is largely a result of a greedy industry making money out of selling junk food to the poor. There are four transnationals in Mexico that hog 95.9 percent of the soft drink market and 89.4 percent of the sweet and salty snacks market. FEMSA (Coca-Cola) and Alsea dominate the food service industry, with Alsea managing and operating restaurants like Domino’s, Starbucks, Burger King, Chili’s, and the Cheesecake Factory. In 2017, Alsea’s revenue was MXN 43 billion (US$2.3 billion).
These industries don’t just determine what food we have access to; they are also instrumental in determining Mexico’s health policies. At least half of the members of the Oment — the Mexican Observatory of Non-transmittable Diseases, which is meant to be the organization overseeing and promoting policy to combat Mexico’s obesity and diabetes problems — have a connection to, or are financed by the food and drink industries.
“Capitalism has decided for us. They tell us what we’re going to eat. They don’t care if our food is healthy, they are invading us with their food… what they do interferes with our territory, our way of life, our way of thinking. They don’t respect what we’ve had and done for thousands of years,” Martinez said.
The junk food invasion has contaminated Mexico’s culture and identity
The consequences of an imposed junk food diet go beyond diabetes.
“These foods are… extremely tasty, sometimes almost addictive. They imitate (real) food, and they are erroneously seen as healthy… they are publicized and sold aggressively, and they are culturally, socially and economically destructive,” says the World Health Organization.
In Mexico, U.S. companies and other industry giants are displacing indigenous and Mexican culture while pretending to consume it within the U.S., and spurring racism toward Mexicans and Mexican immigrants. Even the children in the study of rural and indigenous communities were clear. They told researchers that the junk food invasion causes contamination through the media, “contaminates our land, the water, our culture, our delicious traditional food.”
It brings transnational abuse and market domination that benefits only the rich and affects the poorest people.
“Capitalists see NAFTA as a space for satisfying their desires, not their needs, and for extending their power. They don’t care what indigenous people think, or about our autonomy. They don’t respect our way of life, or care about where we get our water from or what we use the land for. These companies are dedicated to displacing us,” Martinez concluded.
